01 The rule
Long trousers. A low heel.
That is the whole of the dress code at the two riding clubs on Tam Đa street. Morela is being built for the rest of it.
Apparatus The rule is posted at both gates and is not explained at either. Read from the waist down, it is the whole brief.
02 The street
Two gates, one hundred metres.
Tam Đa street runs through Thủ Đức, on the eastern edge of Ho Chi Minh City, about fifteen kilometres from District 1. Two riding clubs stand on it, a hundred metres apart. The walk between them takes two minutes.
Workshop note, 4 September No garment of ours has been worn on this street yet. Every measurement the house takes is taken against it. When that changes this note comes down.
03 The cloth
Measured twice, and one the man never wears.
Once against the tones the market already sells, so it is not a copy. Once against the others in the range, so no two are mistaken for each other at arm's length.
Lightness 85
Lightness 61
Lightness 41, the anchor
Does not cross to the shirt
The cool step
The sky step
Apparatus The house read two thousand three hundred and ten cards under one light, in five sessions of three hours. Every distance in the range is wide enough to survive a market stall and a phone screen. Lark is ruled to the trouser and never crosses.
04 The house colour
It goes on the door, the paper, the thread in a label. It never goes on the man.
A house that wears its own signage is asking to be looked at, and the rider has somewhere to be.
05 The heel
Why the heel is two and a half centimetres.
A flat shoe slides forward through the stirrup, and a foot that goes through the stirrup does not come back out at speed. A heel between two and a half and four centimetres stops the foot at the arch.
That is the reason, and nobody at the gate explains it. A house selling to riders in a country still learning to ride has one job before it has a product. Say what the thing is for.
06 The archive
What a riding coat does without telling you.
These are not our garments. They are the objects the workshop reads, and the standard the house is trying to meet: a detail that is present, useful, and never announced.
The saddle strap and the saddle pad
Built into the back of the coat so the seat sits flat under a body rising and sitting all morning. You would not find them unless you turned the coat over.
Wind cuffs, and a ring inside the collar
The cuff closes at the wrist against the air. The ring holds a guard for the hat. Neither is visible on the hanger.
A train engineered to fail
An 1892 riding skirt whose train breaks away at a set load. The one place the maker deliberately left unreinforced was the place a fall would kill her.
Two cloths, unsubstituted for forty seven years
Bedford cord and cavalry twill, named to a sealed pattern in the 1928 Army Dress Regulations, still in a hunting outfit made in 1975.
The archive was written in cold countries. Ours is not one.
That is the part the house has to solve for itself.
07 The record
What the house is
What it is not
08 Open
Not settled yet.
A house that tells you what it has not decided is easier to trust than one with an answer for everything on the first day. These are open, and they are being worked in this order.
- 01Which garment comes first, and what it costs to make
- 02The factory, by name
- 03The address of the room, and the hours it keeps
- 04Where to write to the house