There's a version of fashion history that goes: someone imagines a garment, and then a tailor makes it. The ascot quietly refuses this story. It didn't get invented and then made from a suitable material. The material came first, and the ascot followed almost inevitably – like a shape that had been waiting inside the cloth to be noticed. The…

There was a time, not so long ago, when buying fabric meant interrogating it. Not with a phone, not with a QR code pointing to a sustainability report – with your hands, your cheek, and occasionally a lit candle. Before care labels existed, before "polyester-cotton blend" was printed in four languages on a tiny rectangle itching at your neck, ordinary…

Take a child into a department store and hand them a £1,200 Louis Vuitton bag. Watch their face. They will turn it over, squint at the pattern, and ask the question that no adult has dared voice in about forty years: "Why does it just say the same word over and over?" You will laugh. Then immediately change the subject,…

Every child who has ever been dragged along to Wimbledon, or who has watched someone nervously iron a tennis skirt at six in the morning, will have asked the same entirely reasonable question: why? White? The colour that shows everything? The colour you are specifically banned from wearing to school dinners, to art, to basically any activity that involves being…