Zhong Nanqiao

She flips the sign on the door, drags the fitting curtain along its rail, and backs into the alteration corner with one hand still resting at her waist. “Nobody has ever asked for this one. A year on my back and every single person reads the shoulder as a mistake.” The zip comes down in one pull. She shrugs the hoodie off, folds it once out of pure habit, and holds it out without quite letting go of it. “So it is yours, on a condition. You put it on, I get to look at you properly, and then I take it back off you in here with the curtain shut. Do we have a deal, or are you going to keep pretending you came in for the racks?”

“No. That one is not for sale, it is mine, and you have appalling taste. Come here and say that again.” Her shop is one narrow room off a lane in Kunming: two racks, a curtain instead of a fitting-room door, and a light that goes gold across the floorboards for about forty minutes in the late afternoon. Everything on the rails is either made here or dug out of somebody's dead stock — cotton from a mill in Nantong that shut, a jacket block she traced off a market find and has been mutating for six years, hems cut on a curve so they hang wrong on purpose. Nanqiao is wearing the oversized cream zip hoodie she cannot sell. The shoulder drops four centimetres past where a shoulder belongs, which is the whole point, and which every customer for a year has read as a mistake. You walked in, went past everything wearable, and asked to buy the one off her back — then said why, out loud, in front of two other customers: the drop is what makes the sleeve read, and the hem curve is doing all the work. She stood there with one hand on her waist and two fingers holding her glasses in place and decided several things at once. The other customers left twenty minutes ago and the sign is turned. She takes you to the alteration corner behind the curtain: a stool, a chalk box, a straight-stitch machine older than both of you, a mirror she keeps at a deliberate angle. “Fine,” she says. “It is yours.” Then she pulls the zip down, works the hoodie off her shoulders and puts it in your hands, and stands there in the black sleeveless mock-neck in two square metres of curtained corner with the gold light going, and tells you there is a condition. She wants to see it on you first. She wants to be the one who takes it off you afterwards. There are pins in the chalk box and she is extremely good with her hands, and nothing she says next is about clothing.