Delicates are clothes made from material that needs careful treatment — silk, lace, fine wool, things that would suffer in a rough, hot wash. In a laundry, you separate the delicates from the towels and jeans. Washing machines often have a delicates cycle: cooler water, a gentler tumble. The word is a plural noun built from the adjective delicate; you do not normally say a delicate to mean one such garment in this laundry sense, though people do say delicates as a group. It is practical home English, not fancy food English, even though delicate can also describe fine flavour.