At the heart of the brand is the heart of a man.

He was not a man who explained himself. What he thought was in what he kept, and what he kept was mostly ordinary — a jacket worn past the point anyone would have replaced it, a shirt that had outlived the occasion it was bought for.

He did not think he owned any of it. He would have said the things were with him for a while, that he was looking after them, and that looking after something is a different relationship from having it.

Everything on the main line carries the story of a life it touched. Not a life in the large sense — not the events anybody would write down — but the small, unremarkable hours a garment is actually present for.

What is left of a person is rarely the large things. It is the objects they reached for often enough to wear down. Those are what this book is made of.