The Provenance

You want to know where it came from: the mill town, the year the pattern was cut, the previous owner, the reason the pocket is that odd shape. You buy objects with a past, you tell that past slightly differently each time, and the telling is a fair share of what you paid for. It is also why your clothes get asked about and other people's get complimented.

Stories are the cheapest thing to manufacture on this entire list. A word on a label is a fact about a fibre's past and says nothing about its grade. Heritage is a marketing department with a locked archive room, a founding year can be bought along with the trademark, and the tannery in the film closed in 2011. Every so often you pay nine hundred dollars for a paragraph.

The paragraph is often true. You are one of the few people who can check.