Leaving a Mark

There is a principle in forensic science called Locard's exchange principle, named after a Frenchman who founded the world's first police crime laboratory in Lyon in 1910. It states, with the confidence only an early-twentieth-century scientist could muster, that every contact leaves a trace.

You touch something; something of you stays on it, and something of it stays on you.

The microscopic residue of an encounter is, according to Locard, always there. You just have to know how to look for it.

I think about this more than is probably healthy. Partly because it's one of those ideas that's beautiful in the abstract and unsettling in the specific. Partly because I was once accused, by someone I loved, of having a suspicious eye for detail, and I have been looking for traces ever since.

Let me give you another one.

In a churchyard in Monmouth, Wales, there is a gravestone carved by a stonemason named John Renie. Renie's entire profession was the deliberate application of Locard's principle — he cut letters into stone for a living, knowing they would outlast him and everyone he knew and probably everyone they knew. When he came to the matter of his own gravestone, he took fourteen years to make it. The result is a grid of 285 letters arranged so that the sentence "Here Lies John Renie" can be read in forty-five thousand, seven hundred and sixty different directions. Up, down, sideways, diagonal. Every path leads to the same sentence. Which is, when you sit with it long enough, both a puzzle and a quietly devastating philosophical statement.

I like John Renie. He spent fourteen years making sure the trace he left behind would be impossible to ignore, and I respect the obsessive single-mindedness of that, even when I suspect he might have been a nightmare to live with.

Now, having given you Locard and Renie, I want to talk about the other kind of mark. The kind nobody writes essays about because nobody thinks it's worth an essay. I'm talking about the thin red groove you find on the skin just above your hip bone at ten o'clock at night, when you finally take your clothes off and discover that your waistband has been slowly composing its objections for the last fourteen hours, in writing, on your body.

It is a petty mark. It is not, in the scheme of things, important. Nobody dies of a waistband imprint. Locard's principle does not get cited in the courts over it. And yet it is there every night, on millions of bodies, a small daily indignity produced by a garment that was sold with the promise of comfort and that has instead been working quietly against your circulation since breakfast.

Here's what I've come to believe about this, and I'm going to say it plainly because dressing it up would be dishonest:

the mass-market underwear industry does not give a damn.

The assumption, long accepted by everyone involved, is that because nobody can see the product, nobody will bother to complain, and because nobody bothers to complain, nobody has to try. This is how you end up with a garment category where the benchmark for "acceptable" is a strip of synthetic fabric that costs less than a cup of coffee, fits approximately nobody, and fails within three months in ways that polite society has decided not to discuss at dinner.

I have discussed them anyway, in earlier columns, because one of the unspoken agreements of adult life is that we're all putting up with small, preventable miseries that nobody has decided are worth fixing. The hotel pillow that's just slightly wrong. The kitchen drawer that sticks. The underwear that leaves a mark.

You could argue — and people have, at dinner parties, while I tried not to roll my eyes — that this isn't worth getting worked up about. Fair. Most things aren't. But there's something interesting in how much minor friction we tolerate without ever asking whether we have to. The people who don't tolerate it, the ones who look at a stuck drawer and decide to fix it, or who find a better pillow and never go back, tend to be, in ways that are hard to describe, more at peace. Not because they've optimized their lives into some joyless productivity cult. Because they've stopped pretending the small stuff doesn't count.

Which brings me, as promised, to the turn.

Here is a thing I find genuinely strange, and I think about it when I am supposed to be thinking about other things.

The most impressive thing a piece of clothing can do — the real craftsmanship, the part that takes actual engineering and actual thought — is to leave no trace.

Locard was a great man and an unimprovable scientist, but there is a narrow, specific exception to his principle, and this is it: a garment that is truly well-designed violates him. You wear it for fourteen hours, and when you take it off, there is nothing. No groove. No pressure line. No evidence. The skin is exactly as it was at seven in the morning.

This is, I think, a more interesting kind of mastery than Renie's. Renie wanted to be remembered and he got his wish, in stone, in Wales, for a while. The opposite ambition — to make something so good that it disappears — is harder to explain and almost impossible to celebrate, because the evidence of its success is an absence. There is no gravestone for good underwear. There is only the quiet fact that, one morning, you put something on and then, some hours later, realized you hadn't thought about it once.

I don't think most people should spend fourteen years of their life on underwear. I don't think anyone should. But I do think it's worth noticing which of the things you put on in the morning are working for you and which are, minute by minute, writing a small red memo into your body.

Not every trace is worth leaving.

Sometimes the highest form of quality is the kind that refuses to sign its name.