Zero History

unners.”
“Sneakers?”
“The ones I wore out walking. The ugliest ones were best for walking, the best-looking
fell apart. The stylists would talk about them, because I’d show up in them, at shoots.
Talk about how the business worked. The factories in China, Vietnam. The big
companies. And I’d started to imagine ones that weren’t ugly at all, that didn’t fall apart.
But somehow,” and she smiled ruefully, “untainted by fashion. I’d started doing
drawings. Very bad ones. But I’d already decided that I really wanted to understand
shoes, their history, how they work, before I tried to do anything. Not that conscious a
decision, but a decision. So I applied to Cordwainers, was accepted, moved to London.
Or rather, simply stopped moving. In London. I may just have been enamored of the idea
of waking up in the same town every day, but I had my mission, the mystery runners that
I couldn’t quite imagine.”
“And you made them, in the end?”
“Two seasons. We couldn’t get away from that structure. But that was only after I’d
graduated. I could still make you quite a smashing pair of shoes, with my own hands,
though the finishing would never get past my tutor there. But they did teach us
everything. Exhaustively.”
“Sneakers?”
“Not the sole-molding or the vulcanization, but I could still cut and sew your uppers.
We used a lot of elk for our line. Very thick, supple. Lovely.” She looked down at the
security cables in her hand. “My second year, there, I met someone, a boy, Danny.
American. From Chicago. Not at Cordwainers but he knew all my friends there. Skater.
Well, not that he skated much. An entrepreneur, that way, but nothing too repulsive.
Made films for some of the American companies. We lived together. Hackney. He had
Hounds,” Meredith said, looking up from the cables, “before there were Hounds.”
“Yes?”
“He had a jacket quite a lot like yours, but made of a sort of canvas, off-white, plain
brass buttons. Always in need of a good wash. Perfectly simple, but it was one of those
things that everyone immediately wanted or, failing that, wanted the name of a designer, a
brand. He’d laugh at them. Tell them it was no-name. Tell them it was ‘fucking real, not
fashion.’ That a friend of his in Chicago had made it.”
“Chicago?”
“Chicago. Where he was from.”
“His friend was a designer?”
“He never called her that.”
“Her?”
“That was no-name too. He wouldn’t tell me her name. He never did.” Looking Hollis
firmly in the eye. “I don’t think she’d been a girlfriend. She was older, I guessed. And
more a hobbyist than a designer, from what he said. He said she did things more out of a