OlfactionaryA fashion problem with a foul cause
Leather tanning in Renaissance Europe relied on animal fat and other harsh, foul-smelling processes, leaving finished gloves, a major status symbol at court, reeking. When Catherine de' Medici arrived in France from Florence to marry the future Henry II, she brought her personal perfumer, Renato Bianco (known in France as René le Florentin), and introduced the Florentine fashion for scenting the gloves outright: soaking them in fat infused with pomegranate, orange blossom, jasmine, or violet before drying.
Grasse's second act
The style spread through the French aristocracy, and the leather-tanning town of Grasse, in Provence, which already had the fat-and-hide infrastructure the scenting process needed, became the epicenter of production. Grasse's tanners, including one credited as Jean de Galimard, pivoted from tanning toward perfumery itself; the town remains the acknowledged capital of the fragrance industry today.
A darker legend attached to the fashion
Catherine de' Medici's name is also attached to a much grimmer story: that she sent a pair of poisoned perfumed gloves to Jeanne d'Albret, the Protestant Queen of Navarre, who died suddenly in 1572 shortly before a politically fraught royal wedding. It's a story historians now treat with real skepticism, transdermal poisoning through gloves would have been unreliable with 16th-century toxins, and most modern accounts consider tuberculosis the far more likely cause of death. The legend says more about the era's suspicion of scent and of Catherine herself than about how she actually operated.