Scene 10¶
Scene 6¶
Sewing as Physics¶
[ Published ]
Scene 6 ✨ Sewing as Physics ✨ [Celeste]
— The First True Test (Celeste POV)
We found it the way we found most good things in Wardrobe: not through inspiration, but through paperwork.
Mara slid a thin archival printout across the cutting table without ceremony. It landed beside my notebook like a challenge.
“Look.”
The image was a plate from an old catalogue: eighteenth century, late enough that it carried a Georgian neatness, early enough that it still remembered softness. A working woman’s garment, not court finery: fitted through the back, generous through the skirt, closures placed for hands that were busy. It had intelligence in it. It had been designed by necessity, not ego.
My pulse tightened, that familiar feeling when history stops being “interesting” and becomes possible.
“Well, it’s not a costume,” I said automatically, more to myself than anyone else. “It’s equipment.”
Mara’s mouth twitched. Approval. She liked that phrasing.
“It’s also clever,” she said. “See the reinforcement here? And here.”
I leaned in, tracing the lines with my fingertip without touching the paper. The sketch suggested a hidden strength at stress points: underarm, waist, the place where movement always found the weak seam. It wasn’t decorative. It was structural.
“We can draft this,” I said. “We can actually draft this.”
Mara already had a pencil in hand.
“Then draft it,” she replied.
That was Mara: no ceremony for the moment a dream became work. The moment you spoke it, you owned it.
We split the labour without speaking. I took the research: proportions, plausible fabric weight, seam placement, what could be original and what had to be translated for a modern body in a modern job. Mara took the pattern: chalk, ruler, sharp decisions. Charlie hovered nearby, the kind of quiet orbit of someone who listened for when he was needed. He didn’t volunteer. He didn’t insert himself. That was one of his strengths. He didn’t presume he belonged at the centre.
We moved fast. Paper became pattern. Pattern became cloth. Cloth became the first prototype under Mara’s hands. The room filled with that particular concentration that only happens when a thing becomes real: pins tapping into the pincushion, the soft rasp of shears, the hiss of the iron. By mid-afternoon the garment hung from the mannequin, half-finished but already legible. Even unfinished, it had a line. It made sense.
It didn’t scream “pretty.” It whispered “capable.”
Mara stepped back, eyes narrowed.
“It’s got spine,” she said.
“It has purpose,” I replied.
Charlie said nothing. He simply reached in and adjusted a seam allowance that had curled under itself, as if the fabric had misbehaved in a way the eye might miss.
Mara noticed. Mara always noticed.
“You’ve got a problem with that, Rossignol?” she asked, not looking at him.
Charlie paused with his fingers on the fabric.
“No,” he said quietly. “Just... making it honest.”
Mara grunted. That was as close to praise as she came without a contract.
We didn’t have time to admire it. Wardrobe had learned that excitement was a luxury you enjoyed after delivery. So we did what we always did next: we tested. Not with a photo shoot. Not with a “try it on and twirl.” With a shift.
We put it on Lucy — one of our most reliable staff, who didn’t treat clothing as costume theatre. Lucy did front-of-house, lifted baskets, crouched for children, ran for late arrivals. She was the kind of wearer who revealed the truth.
She came back near closing time, cheeks flushed, hair escaping pins.
“It looks brilliant,” she announced, breezilyy. “But—”
There’s always a but. Clothing is always honest in the end. She turned slightly and tugged at the underarm.
“Here,” she said. “When I lift my arms. It’s not tearing yet, but it’s... fighting.”
Mara’s eyes flicked to the seam line and her whole brain shifted into assessment.
“And,” Lucy added, touching the waist closure, “this. It held. But it’s been tugged a lot. People grab. You know.”
Yes. We knew.
Mara took the garment from Lucy the way a mechanic takes a part off an engine: no reverence, only focus. She laid it flat on the table and pressed her palm along the seam.
“It’s not failure,” Mara said, and I realised she wasn’t talking to Lucy. She was talking to me. “It’s information.”
“It’s reality,” I replied.
Mara’s gaze sharpened. “Reality is violent.”
“It’s demanding,” I corrected, because words mattered. “Not violent.”
Mara’s mouth twitched again, like she found my idealism irritating but useful.
“Fine,” she said. “Demanding. The point is, it needs a tester who understands what it’s telling us.”
And then she looked — not at Lucy, not at me — but at Charlie.
“Charlie.”
Mara said it the way she said measurements: without softness, without doubt. And it landed differently than Rossignol ever did — not like procedure, but like assignment. Like a small, unspoken promotion into the room’s working language.
She hadn’t used his first name, ever. This was Mara marking a threshold.
Charlie looked up immediately, eyes wide. His face was calm, but I could see the slight tightening around his mouth — the moment he did his internal inventory: what is being asked of me, and what will it cost.
Mara held up the garment with two fingers, as if it weighed nothing.
“You,” she said, “are going to wear it.”
Lucy blinked. “He is?”
Mara nodded. “Yes. He is.”
I didn’t flinch, because this had been forming in my mind all day. We couldn’t test garments properly if our tester didn’t understand construction. And Charlie was the only person in the room whose mind automatically translated feeling into fixing.
But Charlie did something small—so small most people wouldn’t catch it. His eyes flicked down, not to the garment, but to his own torso. A brief recalibration. A moment where the word wear landed as more than a task. It wasn’t dramatic: it was simply the acknowledgement of an idea he had never crossed before:
I’m about to put on attire meant for women.
He inhaled once, measured. Mara didn’t rush him. Mara didn’t soothe. Mara simply waited, giving him the dignity of his own decision. Charlie’s voice, when it came, was quiet and precise.
“For the record,” he said, not looking at Lucy or the other women, but looking at Mara as if Mara was the authority who mattered: “I understand why. It’s... the fastest way to know what fails.”
“Yes.”
Charlie swallowed. The tiniest pause.
“Still,” he added, evenly, “it’s not my first preference.”
There. Acknowledged. Named. No wallowing. No performance. Mara’s eyes didn’t soften. But they did become cleaner, as if she respected him more for stating it plainly.
“Noted,” she said. “And irrelevant.”
Charlie’s mouth twitched, almost a smile and almost not. Mara had a way of stripping the emotion off a thing without stripping the person out of it. I chose my moment carefully.
“It’s equipment, Charlie,” I said, calm. “Not identity. We’re not asking you to become anything. We’re asking you to report accurately.”
Charlie’s gaze flicked to me — quick, startled. Then away again, as if eye contact was too loud for what he was doing internally.
“Yes,” he said, mostly to himself. “Accurately.”
Lucy looked between us, a little uncertain, then shrugged with the easy pragmatism of someone who’d worked with Wardrobe long enough to trust the women running it.
“If anyone asks,” Lucy said lightly, “you’re a mannequin with opinions.”
Mara snorted.
“Don’t be daft,” Mara said. “He’s not a mannequin. He’s a stress map.”
That made Charlie blink. Being called useful in Mara’s language was a kind of privilege. We moved to the fitting area. Mara drew the curtain and held the garment up.
“Arms up,” she said.
Charlie complied, efficient, as if his body were a coat stand. That was how he survived discomfort: by treating himself as part of the process. Not numbing out: simply focusing.
Mara didn’t fuss. She worked quickly, checking line, checking pull, checking where the fabric resisted movement. She wasn’t dressing him; she was assessing the garment’s behaviour on a frame. I stood just outside the curtain, notebook in hand, listening to the sound of pins and Mara’s clipped instructions.
“Turn. Now lift your arms. Higher. Good. Twist. Again.”
Charlie’s responses were quiet, obedient, but not meek. He did not apologise for existing. He followed instructions like a professional. Then Mara’s voice snapped: irritated, but satisfied.
“There,” she said. “Feel that?”
A beat.
Charlie’s voice came through the curtain, measured.
“Yes,” he said. “It’s not the seam itself. It’s the direction of strain. When I raise my arms, the tension line runs across the tape and stops the fabric doing its job.”
Mara exhaled sharply. “Say it again.”
Charlie repeated it, clearer the second time, because Mara demanded clarity like a tool. “And the closure,” he continued without being prompted, “holds. But if someone grabs here—” there was a faint sound of fabric being tugged — “it transfers force to the waistband. You need the reinforcement to stop before the pivot point, or it becomes a lever. It will eventually tear next to the reinforcement.”
Mara’s silence was almost reverent. Not warm: reverent... in the way a professional respects a correct diagnosis. I wrote fast, my mind already mapping the fix. Stop the tape at the pivot. Shift the ease. Strengthen without bulk. Preserve silhouette. Mara drew the curtain back.
Charlie stepped out, still in the garment, looking slightly flushed with the faint heat of having been under scrutiny. He kept his eyes on the floor for a beat, then lifted them to the table like a person returning to work. Mara grabbed chalk and marked a line on the garment where his finger had indicated strain.
“Good.”
Charlie stood still, letting her mark him up like he was a draft. I watched his face: how controlled it was, how determined. There was a kind of bravery in being willing to do a thing you disliked because it was necessary, without demanding anyone comfort you for it.
“That’s why,” Mara said to me, curt, as if she’d just proved a point, “we don’t test with people who only wear.”
I nodded. “We test with people who understand.”
Mara’s eyes flicked to Charlie.
“We test with Charlie,” she finished.
Charlie’s ears went slightly pink. Not flattery, more like the discomfort of being singled out as having a key role.
I kept my voice neutral, because tone mattered. “We log everything,” I said, already flipping to a clean page in my notebook. “Every deviation from the original design. Every reinforcement. Every reason.”
Mara nodded. “Good. Make it defensible.”
Then, without ceremony, she pointed at Charlie.
“Take it off,” she said. “And write me a report.”
Charlie blinked. “A report.”
“Yes,” Mara said. “What you felt. Where it pulled. What caused it. What you propose. In plain language. No poetry.”
“Right.”
He moved towards the fitting curtain again, and this time the moment of misgiving didn’t follow him like a shadow. The task had overtaken the discomfort. Work had swallowed the awkwardness, the way it always did for him. As he disappeared behind the curtain, I realised something with a cold, clean satisfaction:
We hadn’t asked him to be brave in front of a classroom. We’d asked him to be precise in a room that respected precision. And he’d answered the way he always answered when the world stopped trying to eat him:
By becoming indispensable.
Mara looked at my notebook.
“Title it,” she said.
I wrote at the top of the page, in neat block letters:
DESIGN REALISATION — PROTOTYPE 1 — STRESS TEST LOG
Then underneath, because it mattered, because it named what we were building:
Tester: Charlie Rossignol Purpose: durability + mobility without silhouette compromise Notes: equipment, not theatre
Mara’s gaze flicked over my shoulder, and her mouth twitched again.
“Good,” she said. “Now we do it properly.”
And in that moment, with chalk on fabric and a plan on paper, Wardrobe stopped being a place that repaired old worlds.
It became a place that made new ones.