Having a suit built specifically for me has been a dream for a long time. The experience has, to date, exceeded expectations and taught me things I did not expect to learn. I’ve decided to spend a few posts sorting through some of these reflections.

I could be called shallow and I have been called pretentious. I don’t mind. I am shallow and I am pretentious. To paraphrase someone, we’re all in shit but some of us are swimming to the surface. In my tailor’s shop I had my first –I hope, not my last– breath of fresh air. It felt good. The world made sense.

The difficulty is isolating my favourite part of the experience. If pushed, I would say that it was the fitting. Lengths were taken, quirks assessed, widths looked at and I was quickly and efficiently turned into mathematics by an expert.

It was utterly inhuman and, yet, at the same time, utterly human. As the physicist Niels Bohr once said: “There are trivial truths and the great truths. The opposite of a trivial truth is plainly false. The opposite of a great truth is also true.”

I was turned into something not myself — a representation on paper that will be turned into something else not myself, a suit. To do this properly, there could be no sucking in the gut, no standing funny or making my arms different lengths than what they really are. There could be no lies.

Something as pretentious as a bespoke suit can only be built upon a foundation of honesty. The more complete the truth, the better the lie. In comparison, off the the rack clothing pales, pukes and dies. It even fails to be a trivial truth, becoming its opposite. And the exact opposite of a small truth is not a small untruth: It is a big lie.

Mass produced clothing is built along standard lines. It is not built to fit us; We are supposed to fit into it. This is affordable. Frugality has always been insanity’s last argument.

The appeal of mass production is that it makes things cheap and available. This may be a good thing. For some people. But, we must remember that, aside from cheapening goods, it also cheapens human life.

There’s real people enslaved in real sweatshops, so that we may avoid paying the real price of anything. To make what? Mass produced, cheap clothes. We might as well be wearing uniforms. Most of us are. Take your Nike Swoosh and replace it with a Nazi Swastika. At least they never lied about their feelings towards the individual.

We do. In every advert we’re sold a big lie about mass production making us unique.

Well, it doesn’t, it can’t and it won’t. You are already unique. The odds against your birth were astronomical and your genome is complex. It’s the same for the slave who stitches up our sneakers. Their life is special too. It’s wasted and destroyed so we can afford crap we don’t need and probably don’t even want. Some animals, I suppose, are more unique than other animals.

Arguments in favor of slavery are always economic. They’re always supremely practical for everyone other than the slave. Above any sort of racism, plantation owners were concerned about the cotton industry. This makes it worst.

We never did away with slavery. We used sharecropping and then, when moving goods became cheap enough, we outsourced slavery to the third world so that we might continue to reap its benefits while better avoiding its ugliness. We actually took slavery and made it worse. We still use economic arguments to justify it.

But that’s politics and that’s money. As someone who writes fiction, I am more interested in art. And art, to me, is two things:

First, it is well-developed craft. I’ve seen double-plays in baseball that have more artistic merit than some books. From the look of the shirts I’ve seen, my tailor has some pretty well-developed craft. I’d even say one of them is a triple play.

Second, art is the application of philosophy to reality. A bespoke tailor takes my philosophy about so much – honesty and lies, individualism and off the rack personalities, formulas and thoughts- and applies it to something real.

His accomplishment is increased because it happens in the medium of clothes rather than that of painting, literature or film. He must adhere to the reality of the honest human form, while other artists must obey or disobey only a series of abstract rules. A painter can put pants on his creation’s head or a nose on a cheek. A tailor does not have that luxury. I respect that discipline because it is real.

This view may make me shallow and it may make me pretentious. I hope it does. Art is shallow and pretension requires truth.