• Melinda Bufton
 

You say to the tailor I’m looking for High Concept, and it makes for collaborations

 

so stretchy you don’t even know when the elastic

 

will snap back.  You know I used to work with this guy called Sam, and he told me a story of a school friend.  They were both boys, as it happened, in Manchester the only

 

2 boys enrolled in Fashion for O levels.  They corresponded.  Let me tell you about my friend, he invented a pair of pants SO LOW that the bum crack became a beauteous cleavage.  He was pleased but lamented

 

How will the lady wear her knickers?  She won’t, Sam laughed.

 

Anyway, his name was Matthew Williamson.

 

Matthew Williamson?!  Next day I brought in a magazine profile.  Sam was morose-o.  In fact, I said, Lee McQueen invented the bumster.  But I did not check about Intellectual Property, or temporal relativity.

 

Mancunian tailors are all the rage, now. 

 

Once she said she was saving for Manchester and our friend thought she meant

 

SHEETS.

 

You say to the tailor, I want the seams as flat as your two pink palms can

 

press them, easy on the steam eyes but apply your serger wherever a handstitch cannot reach. Madame, this is difficult to say as customers do not lie, but there is nowhere

 

my handstitch

 

cannot reach.

 

What silhouette is this/is this the shape of things to come…