Zero History

keeping this on. I’m doing something with my kids. Difficult to keep in touch, with the
time difference.”
“Your logo worries me, a little.”
“It was drawn by the woman Bigend had sent me to find. She was a filmmaker. She
died, a few years after I found her.”
Hollis was watching emotion in the woman’s face, a transparency that easily trumped
her beauty, which was considerable. “I’m sorry.”
“Her sister sent me some of her things. There was this unnerving little doodle, at the
bottom of a page of notes. When we had the notes translated, they were about the legend
of the Gabriel Hounds.”
“I’d never heard of them.”
“Neither had I. And when I began making my own things, I didn’t want a brand name,
a logo, anything. I’d always removed branding from my own clothes, because of that
sensitivity. And I couldn’t stand anything that looked as though a designer had touched it.
Eventually I realized that if I felt that way about something, that meant it hadn’t been that
well designed. But my husband made a compelling case for there being a need to brand, if
we were going to do what I was proposing to do. And there was her squiggle, at the
bottom of that page.” She looked down at the horizonal screen again, then up at Hollis.
“My husband is from Chicago. We lived there, after we met, and I discovered the ruins of
American manufacturing. I’d been dressing in its products for years, rooting them out of
warehouses, thrift shops, but I’d never thought of where they’d come from.”
“Your things are beautifully made.”
“I saw that an American cotton shirt that had cost twenty cents in 1935 will often be
better made than almost anything you can buy today. But if you re-create that shirt, and
you might have to go to Japan to do that, you wind up with something that needs to retail
for around three hundred dollars. I started bumping into people who remembered how to
make things. And I knew that how I dressed had always attracted some attention. There
were people who wanted what I wore. What I curated, Bigend would have said.”
“He’s curating suits that do retinal damage, these days.”
“He has no taste at all, but he behaves as if he’s had it removed, elective surgery.
Perhaps he did. That search he sent me on somehow removed my one negotiable talent.
I’d been a sort of coolhunter as well, before that had a name, but now it’s difficult to find
anyone who isn’t. I suspect he’s responsible for that, somehow. Some kind of global
contagion.”
“And you began to make clothing, in Chicago?”
“We were having children.” She smiled, glanced down at the screen, stroked it with a
fingertip. “So it wasn’t as though I had much time. But my husband’s work was going
well. So I could afford to experiment. And I discovered I really loved doing that.”
“People wanted the things you made.”
“That was frightening, at first. I just wanted to explore processes, learn, be left alone.