The Seam Reader

You turn a jacket inside out on the shop floor, which is rude and correct. What you are counting is operations: a welt, a sleeve head set by hand, a lining felled rather than blown in, twenty five separate hardware settings on a bag that photographs as plain. Every one of those is a person and a wage, and that is the only part of a price you consider real.

The trouble is that hours are invisible on a shelf and worth nothing at resale. Nobody will ever ask you about the sleeve head. You pay double for a jacket that photographs identically to the fused one beside it, and the day you sell it the market pays you for the label and zero for the labour, because the market cannot see it either. You are buying an argument you can only win in private.

Wear it ten years and the argument makes itself.