Zero History

“Exactly. Pants, but only just the right ones. We could never have engineered so
powerful a locus of consumer desire. It’s like sex in a bottle.”
“Not for me.”
“You’re female.”
“They want to be soldiers?”
“Not to be. To self-identify as. However secretly. To imagine they may be mistaken for,
or at least associated with. Virtually none of these products will ever be used for anything
remotely like what they were designed for. Of course that’s true of most of the contents
of your traditional army-navy store. Whole universes of wistful male fantasy in those
places. But the level of consumer motivation we’re seeing, the fact that these are often
what amount to luxury goods, and priced accordingly. That’s new. I felt like a
neurosurgeon, when this was brought to my attention, discovering a patient whose
nervous system is congenitally and fully exposed. It’s just so nakedly obvious. Fantastic,
really.”
“And it ties into military contracting?”
“Deeply, though not simply. A lot of the same players, where the stuff actually
originates. But your civilian buyer, your twenty-first-century Walter Mitty, needs it the
way a mod, in this street, in 1965, needed the right depth of vent on a suitcoat.”
“It sounds ridiculous to me.”
“Almost exclusively a boy thing.”
“Almost,” she agreed, remembering Heidi’s IDF bra.
“Milgrim and Sleight were in South Carolina because it seemed someone there might be
on the brink of a Department of Defense contract. For pants. Since it’s something we’ve
been looking to get into ourselves, quite actively, we decided to have a closer look at their
product.”
“ ‘They’ who?”
“We’re still looking into that.”
“It’s not the sort of thing I’d have ever imagined you doing. Military contracts, I mean.
I don’t get it.”
“It’s the one garment industry with none of the fantastic dysfunction of fashion. And
hugely better profit margins. But at the same time everything that works, in fashion, also
works in military contracting.”
“Not everything, surely.”
“More than you imagine. The military, if you think about it, largely invented branding.
The whole idea of being ‘in uniform.’ The global fashion industry is based on that. But
the people whose prototype we had Milgrim photograph and make rubbings of, in South
Carolina, have evidently turned Sleight. And here we are.”
“Where?”
“In a position,” he said, firmly, “of possible danger.”
“Because Sleight’s your personal IT man?”