How do we learn to recognise quality?

A few months ago, I found myself going through an old bag of clothing that had been sitting untouched for years. Most of it felt strangely unfamiliar. There were jackets I had once convinced myself I would wear forever, T-shirts I had forgotten I even owned, and garments that still looked perfectly presentable despite never leaving the cupboard. It was surprising how quickly something could lose its place in your life without you ever noticing it had gone. 

Near the bottom of the bag was an old green and black flannel I used to wear almost every day when I was younger. The collar had softened over time and the cuffs were beginning to fray. Years of washing had left the fabric slightly uneven, while the Australian sun had quietly faded parts of the shoulders and sleeves. By most measures it had reached the point where it probably should have been replaced. Yet it was the only thing I wanted to keep.

That surprised me more than anything else, but I don't think it was nostalgia. I  remember acquiring this flannel at the Gap store in Harajuku many years ago during one of my earlier visits to Japan. One of the qualities that drew me to the flannel at that time was the weight and texture. As I held the flannel again in my hands, it simply felt right. It has developed a kind of ease that newer garments often struggle to achieve. Nothing about it seemed designed to impress the wearer straight away. Yet the longer I held it, the more difficult it became to put down.

Around the same time, I had been reading The Unknown Craftsman by Soetsu Yanagi. One particular passage stayed with me long after I had finished the chapter. Yanagi suggested that the beauty of an object is often revealed not when we admire it, but when we live with it. A bowl sitting quietly on a shelf tells us very little. But a bowl used every day for decades begins to reveal something else entirely. I found myself thinking about the flannel again.

Perhaps the reason it felt different had very little to do with the garment itself. Perhaps what I was responding to was everything that had happened since it was made. The fabric had softened where my body naturally moved. The sleeves had folded in the same places thousands of times. The fading wasn't decorative; it was simply me wearing it as I go about my ordinary life. None of those qualities could have been designed into the garment on the day it left the factory. They had to be earned.

This made me reconsider how I had spent much of my younger years thinking about quality. Like many people, I assumed it announced itself immediately. Heavier fabrics. Cleaner construction. Sharper finishes. If something looked expensive, I generally accepted that it must also be well made. It seemed like a sensible way to judge an object when you knew very little about it. The older I get, the less convinced I become.

I remember reading an interview with Shiro Kuramata in which he spoke about good objects continuing to reveal themselves over time. The things we continue returning to rarely exhaust our attention. Instead, they seem to reward it. Each year spent alongside them reveals another small detail that somehow escaped us before. Perhaps that has become more difficult today. Most things now arrive already explained. Before we've had the opportunity to form our own opinion, we're told why something matters, why it's innovative, why it's exclusive, why we should want it. There is very little left for us to discover on our own.

I've started wondering whether learning to recognise quality has less to do with becoming more knowledgeable, and more to do with becoming more attentive.

Over the past year, that thought has followed me into my own work. While developing garments, I have found myself asking fewer questions about how something should look on the day somebody first wears it, and more questions about how it might feel after ten years. How will the fabric settle? How will the collar soften? Will the customer still wear it after the novelty has disappeared? Those questions have fundamentally changed the way I think about making clothes.

The flannel is folded back inside the cupboard now, I still don't wear it very often. But every now and then I take it out, hold it for a moment to reconnect with that feeling.

I still don't think I've completely understood why it has become the garment I value most but perhaps that is the beginning of learning to recognise quality.