Scene 14¶

✨ Second Attempt ✨¶

[Publish]

Scene 14 ✨Second Attempt ✨

[Celeste POV]

[Emily]
It’s not only realistic — it’s exactly the sort of “holy grail” problem a serious wardrobe shop would chase, and it fits Attempt Two beautifully because Attempt Two is the moment where they stop thinking “fix this garment” and start thinking “build a repeatable system.”

The key realism point¶

You’re right: stays are individual. Historically, the “good” ones were bespoke, and even today you don’t get a reliable result without fitting.

But that doesn’t mean you can’t have a working template. In sewing terms, it’s a block or sloper: a base pattern engineered to be predictably adjustable. That’s the whole game: not “one pattern fits all,” but “one pattern that changes in known ways.”

And in your story, Mara would absolutely see that as a grail because it turns artistry into infrastructure.

How Mara can make this credible (without over-explaining)¶

1) She defines what the template is¶

Not a finished pattern. A reference geometry with controlled variables:

torso length (waist-to-underbust; waist-to-top edge)
rib spring vs hip spring (how much it needs to flare above/below waist)
bust shaping strategy (more relevant for some bodies than others)
back width / shoulder blade room (especially for working movement)
lacing gap rule (how much adjustability you’re building in)

2) She refuses “comfort” as the yardstick¶

She uses “working acceptability” metrics:

can lift/reach/bend without edge roll
no bruising at predictable pressure points after X minutes
lacing tension distributes without grommet distortion
seams don’t creep under repeated movement

That keeps your tone grounded and non-prurient.

3) She avoids using staff bodies as test subjects¶

This is important for your women-led safety lane.

So she uses:

padded/adjustable forms (“we pad to the body we need”)
a “movement rig” approach: test lines of strain by marking and pulling where load would go
and only then does a human wear-test happen, under strict protocol.

Charlie stays the debugger, but the shop doesn’t become dependent on him as “the body.”

Yes: put it in Attempt Two — and it actually makes Attempt Two stronger¶

Attempt One taught “stays lie.” Attempt Two can teach the next truth:

A fix that works on Charlie can still fail as a method.

That is exactly the moment Mara would pivot to block-building.

Scene 14¶

✨ Second Attempt ✨¶

Mara didn’t call it Attempt Two until it had already begun.

She had the failed mock-up on the table again, flattened like evidence. Chalk marks still faint on the canvas where the garment had confessed under movement: diagonal strain lines, a crease that had formed with embarrassing consistency, the small oval ghost of where the grommet had started to surrender. Charlie hovered at the edge of the table, hands clean, eyes busy. He looked like someone waiting to be given a correct problem, the kind with a solution.

Mara didn’t give him that. She gave him a harder one.

“Attempt Two,” she said, and slid the ledger toward him. “Write the same headings. Then add another.”

Charlie opened the book. “Another... what?”

“BODY TYPE.”

He blinked. “But it’s... me.”

Mara’s eyes lifted, sharp as pins.

“And do you imagine,” she said, “that the world is shaped like you?”

Charlie flushed at once. The question had exposed assumptions. Assumptions limit imagination.

“No,” he said quickly. “No. I— I know that.”

“Good,” Mara replied. “Then you understand that we were never going to design stays as though your proportions are the default. As though anyone’s proportions were the default. With stays, there are no defaults.”

I felt a prickle of realisation. This was the moment the atelier either stayed a clever little pocket of talent, or became something that could scale without turning people into spectacles. Mara tapped the mock-up with one finger.

“This attempt did something useful,” she said. “It told us where the load went. We’ll fix that.” She pushed the strip of twill tape toward Charlie. “Secondary anchor here. Tie point moves. Reinforce the side-back seam.”

Charlie nodded, already picturing it.

Mara held up a hand. “But Attempt Two is not only about this garment. Attempt Two is about a method.”

Charlie’s pen paused above the paper. “A method.”

“A working block.”

He frowned slightly. He was trying to translate her words into geometry. Mara turned her attention to me.

“Celeste. Bring me the measurements sheet.”

I reached into the folder Celeste-the-student kept for everything — notes, references, little pieces of paper that might become useful later — and pulled out the page we’d started last week: columns of numbers and blank lines, a grid that looked innocuous until you realised it was the skeleton of a system. Mara took it, scanned it, and made a dissatisfied sound.

“This is a list,” she said. “Not a tool.”

I felt myself bristle. Then I reminded myself she wasn’t insulting me. She was protecting the work.

“What does a tool look like?”

Mara set the sheet down and drew a clean rectangle in the margin with her pencil.

“Waist,” she said, and drew a line across it. “Everything references waist. Not bust. Not hip. Waist is the hinge point.” She drew a vertical line down the rectangle. “Centre front. Centre back. If those aren’t stable, nothing else matters.”

Then she drew two arcs: one above the waist, one below.

“Rib spring,” she said, tapping the top arc. “Hip spring,” she tapped the bottom arc. “Those two numbers tell you what you’re really building. The rest is persuasion.”

Charlie leaned in, eyes locked on the sketch. It was the way he looked at diagrams when he finally felt safe to show his mind working.

“So... it’s not just circumference,” he said slowly. “It’s distribution.”

Mara’s mouth tightened with approval. “Yes. Distribution. And distribution changes with the body.” She slid the pencil toward him. “Now you draw it.”

Charlie hesitated for a fraction of a second — old habit, old fear of doing it wrong in front of someone who might mock — and then he picked up the pencil and drew his own rectangle beside hers. He drew the waist line. Then he measured a distance above it with the pencil tip.

“Torso length,” he said quietly. “From waist to underbust. And waist to top edge.”

Mara watched his hand, not intervening. Charlie added small marks down the centre back.

“Back length. And where the shoulder blades... push.”

Mara nodded once. “Working garment. People breathe. People lift. They don’t stand like portraits.”

He drew the arcs — rib and hip — and this time he did what Mara had done: he made the arcs different. Not symmetrical, not polite. Mara’s finger tapped the page near centre back.

“Now. That’s the block.”

Charlie looked up. “But... that’s still just one.”

Mara leaned on the table, the way she did when she was about to say something that would become policy.

“One block,” she said, “per category.”

Charlie’s brow furrowed. Mara lifted three fingers.

“We start with three. That’s all. Three bodies we can pad and test without dragging staff into it.”

She ticked them off, each one a label rather than a story.

“Nymph,” she said, looking at Charlie without softness. “Slender, narrow ribs, little flesh to absorb pressure. Your closest category.”

I saw the tiny shift behind Charlie eyes. Mara successfully made nymph technical, not personal.

“Well-nourished young lass,” Mara continued, “with generous spring and softness. The kind that makes lazy patterns lie and makes cheap stays cruel.” Then her gaze moved away, outward—as if she were thinking of someone in the world who existed beyond our room.

“And the returning-to-work mother,” she said, matter-of-fact, “whose torso has done real labour and carries it differently. Different distribution. Different tolerances. Different needs.”

Charlie’s pencil hovered. “So we... draft three blocks.”

“We draft one,” Mara corrected. “We draft a base that can be adjusted predictably. And we learn which adjustments belong to which category.”

She reached for the ledger and pointed at Charlie’s new heading.

“BODY TYPE,” she repeated. “Write it every time. Because if you don’t, you’ll start believing a good fit on you means you’ve solved anything.”

Charlie’s pencil moved.

ATTEMPT 2 — BODY TYPE: NYMPH (BASELINE)

Mara slid the mock-up back toward him. “Now do the practical fix,” she said. “Tie point moves twelve millimetres. Secondary anchor tape. Reinforce seam. Bias the binding correctly.”

Charlie nodded, grateful for a concrete task. He began unpicking the grommet area with careful fingers.

Mara watched for a moment, then turned to me.

“Celeste,” she said. “You like research.”

I kept my face neutral. “Yes.”

“Good. Your job is to find period examples of working stays and note what they compromise. Not the pretty ones. The honest ones.”

I felt my spine straighten. That was a role. Not a favour.

“I can do that.”

Mara pointed to the sketch Charlie had drawn. “And you,” she said to him, “are going to make that block into a template we can mark and reuse. Hole positions. Seam allowances. Boning channels. All of it. Clean. Repeatable.”

Charlie looked up, startled. “Me?”

Mara’s stare didn’t waver. “Yes, you. You have the mind for it. You want perfection? Earn it. We’ll make your perfection useful.”

Charlie swallowed. Then, quietly, “Okay.”

Mara tapped the ledger page once.

“And we will not,” she said, “pretend this is solved when it sits nicely standing still.”

Charlie’s eyes flicked to the movement list pinned near the fitting nook: reach, bend, lift, stairs. Mara followed his gaze.

“Fit standing is a lie,” she said again, as if it needed repeating until it became religion. “Fit moving is the truth.”

Charlie nodded, and for the first time he looked less like a boy being tolerated in a women’s workspace and more like a technician being entrusted with a system. He picked up Attempt Two and handed it to Mara.

She matter-of-factly laced it. Then Charlie lifted his arms. Reached forward. Bent. The top edge behaved better this time—less roll, less spite. The diagonal strain line softened, as if the load had been persuaded into a more reasonable route. But something else happened, subtle enough that only someone looking for truth would see it.

A tiny hinge formed along one boning channel at the side. Not a tear. Not yet. A kink — a promise. Charlie felt it at the same instant Mara saw it. His jaw tightened.

Mara didn’t react with disappointment. She reacted with satisfaction.

“There,” she said, almost pleased. “Second-order failure. That’s the real work showing itself.”

Charlie let out a breath that sounded almost like a laugh... small, disbelieving.

“It fixed one thing,” he said, “and revealed another.”

Mara nodded. “Exactly.”

Charlie went to the ledger and wrote without being told.

RESULT: improved load distribution at waist tie; reduced top edge roll under forward reach NEW FAILURE: hinge/kink at side boning channel under bend; pressure point emerging

He looked up. “Is that because I’m... too slim there?”

Mara’s gaze was cool, not unkind.

“It’s because you’re a baseline,” she said. “And baselines are useful precisely because they are not everyone.”

She leaned in, voice lowering into something like a vow.

“This,” she said, tapping the ledger, “is how we get the grail. Not by hoping. By mapping.”

Charlie stared at the page for a long second. Then he nodded, once, slow.

“Okay,” he said, and this time it wasn’t compliance.

It was commitment.

Why this lands (and stays believable)¶

It acknowledges your exact concern: Charlie isn’t the world.
It gives Mara a plausible professional obsession: a reusable block + adjustment rules.
It keeps everything in “craft + system” language.
It plants a clean second-order failure for Attempt Two (hinge/kink), which is extremely believable and gives you a clear Attempt Three direction without bogging down.

If you want, I can write Attempt Two’s continuation as a shorter “fix-and-reveal” beat:¶

Charlie proposes a channel/boning adjustment and/or a slight redistribution of stiffness
Mara insists they document the “rule”: when slim baseline kinks here, what will happen on a softer body?
Celeste starts a “category matrix” page in the binder: nymph / well-nourished / mother — likely failure modes and likely fixes

Just say the word and I’ll carry it forward in the same voice.

Done — here’s a publish-ready Scene 14 that includes the micro-tightening, plus three concrete “working stays” reference targets Celeste can credibly pull (with a quick note on what each one teaches the atelier).

Scene 14¶

✨ Second Attempt ✨¶

Scene 14 (Publish-ready, tightened)

Mara didn’t call it Attempt Two until it had already begun.

The failed mock-up lay on the table again, flattened like evidence. Chalk marks still faint on the canvas where the garment had confessed under movement: diagonal strain lines, a crease that had formed with embarrassing consistency, the small oval ghost of where a grommet had started to surrender. Charlie hovered at the edge of the table, hands clean, eyes busy. He looked like someone waiting to be given a solvable problem, the kind with a correct answer.

Mara didn’t give him that. She gave him a harder one.

“Attempt Two,” she said, and slid the ledger toward him. “Write the same headings. Then add another.”

Charlie opened the book. “Another... what?”

“BODY TYPE.”

He blinked. “But it’s... me.”

Mara’s eyes lifted, sharp as pins.

“And do you imagine,” she said, “that the world is shaped like you?”

Charlie flushed at once. I felt the assumption snap in him, and with it, the little limits he’d been carrying without noticing.

“No,” he said quickly. “No. I... I know that.”

“Good,” Mara replied. “Then you understand we were never going to design stays as though your proportions are the default. As though anyone’s proportions were the default. With stays, there are no defaults.”

A prickle went through me. This was the moment the atelier either stayed a pocket of talent, or became something that could scale without turning people into spectacles. Mara tapped the mock-up with one finger.

“This attempt did something useful,” she said. “It told us where the load went. We’ll fix that.” She pushed the strip of twill tape toward Charlie. “Secondary anchor here. Tie point moves. Reinforce the side-back seam.”

Charlie nodded, already picturing it.

Mara held up a hand. “But Attempt Two is not only about this garment. Attempt Two is about a method.”

Charlie’s pen paused above the paper. “A method.”

“A working block.”

He frowned slightly. He was trying to translate her words into geometry. Mara turned her attention to me.

“Celeste. Bring me the measurements sheet.”

I reached into the folder I kept for everything — notes, references, scraps of paper that might become useful later — and pulled out the page we’d started last week: columns of numbers and blank lines, a grid that looked innocuous until you realised it was the skeleton of a system. Mara took it, scanned it, and made a dissatisfied sound.

“This is a list,” she said. “Not a tool.”

I felt myself bristle. Then I reminded myself she wasn’t insulting me. She was protecting the work.

“What does a tool look like?”

Mara set the sheet down and drew a clean rectangle in the margin with her pencil.

“Waist,” she said, and drew a line across it. “Everything references waist. Not bust. Not hip. Waist is the hinge point.” She drew a vertical line down the rectangle. “Centre front. Centre back. If those aren’t stable, nothing else matters.”

Then she drew two arcs: one above the waist, one below.

“Rib spring,” she said, tapping the top arc. “Hip spring,” she tapped the bottom arc. “Those two numbers tell you what you’re really building. The rest is persuasion.”

Charlie leaned in, eyes locked on the sketch, the way he looked at diagrams when he finally felt safe to show his mind working.

“So... it’s not just circumference,” he said slowly. “It’s distribution.”

Mara’s mouth tightened with approval. “Yes. Distribution. And distribution changes with the body.” She slid the pencil toward him. “Now you draw it.”

Charlie hesitated for a fraction of a second — old habit, old fear of doing it wrong in front of someone who might mock — and then he picked up the pencil and drew his own rectangle beside hers. He drew the waist line. Then he measured a distance above it with the pencil tip.

“Torso length,” he said quietly. “From waist to underbust. And waist to top edge.”

Mara watched his hand, not intervening. Charlie added small marks down the centre back.

“Back length. And where the shoulder blades... push.”

Mara nodded once. “Working garment. People breathe. People lift. They don’t stand like portraits.”

He drew the arcs — rib and hip — and this time he did what Mara had done: he made the arcs different. Not symmetrical, not polite. Mara’s finger tapped the page near centre back.

“Now, that’s the block.”

Charlie looked up. “But... that’s still just one.”

Mara leaned on the table, the way she did when she was about to say something that would become policy.

“One block,” she said, “per category.”

Charlie’s brow furrowed. Mara lifted three fingers.

“We start with three. That’s all. Three bodies we can pad and test without dragging staff into it.”

She ticked them off, each one a label rather than a story.

“Nymph,” she said, looking at Charlie without softness. “Fairly slender, narrow ribs, only a little flesh to absorb pressure. Your closest category.”

I saw the tiny shift behind Charlie’s eyes. Mara made nymph technical, not personal.

“Well-nourished young woman,” Mara continued, “with generous spring and softness. The kind that makes lazy patterns lie and makes cheap stays be cruel.” Then her gaze moved away, outward — as if she were thinking of someone beyond our room.

“And the returning-to-work mother,” she said, matter-of-fact, “whose torso has done real labour and carries it differently. Different distribution. Different tolerances. Different needs.”

Charlie’s pencil hovered. “So we... draft three blocks.”

“We draft one,” Mara corrected. “We draft a base that can be adjusted predictably. And we learn which adjustments belong to which category.”

She reached for the ledger and pointed at Charlie’s new heading.

“BODY TYPE,” she repeated. “Write it every time. Because if you don’t, you’ll start believing a good fit on you means you’ve solved anything.”

Charlie’s pencil moved.

ATTEMPT 2 — BODY TYPE: NYMPH (BASELINE)

Mara slid the mock-up back toward him. “Now do the practical fix,” she said. “Tie point moves twelve millimetres. Secondary anchor tape. Reinforce seam. Bias the binding correctly.”

Charlie nodded, grateful for a concrete task. He began unpicking the grommet area with careful fingers. Mara watched for a moment, then turned to me.

“Celeste,” she said. “You like research.”

“Yes.”

“Good. Your job is to find extant examples of working stays and note what they compromise. Not the pretty ones. The honest ones.”

My spine straightened. That was a role. Not a favour.

“I can do that.”

Mara pointed to Charlie’s sketch. “And you,” she said to him, “are going to make that block into a template we can mark and reuse. Hole positions. Seam allowances. Boning channels. All of it. Clean. Repeatable.”

Charlie looked up, startled. “Me?”

Mara’s stare didn’t waver. “Yes, you. You have the mind for it: you understand the geometry, the physics. You want perfection? Earn it. We’ll make your perfection useful.”

Charlie swallowed. Then, quietly, “Okay.”

Mara tapped the ledger page once.

“And we will not,” she said, “pretend this is solved when it sits nicely standing still.”

Charlie’s eyes flicked to the movement list pinned near the fitting nook: reach, bend, lift, stairs. Mara followed his gaze.

“Fit standing is a lie,” she said. “Fit moving is the truth.”

Charlie nodded, and for the first time he looked less like a youth being tolerated in a women’s workspace and more like a technician being entrusted with a system. He picked up the Attempt Two mock-up and handed it to Mara. She matter-of-factly laced him into it. Charlie lifted his arms. Reached forward. Bent.

The top edge behaved better this time: less roll, less spite. Whether it was that bit of fullness in his chest I'd noticed when he first arrived at Wardrobe that first day remained to be seen. The diagonal strain line softened, as if the load had been persuaded into a more reasonable route.

But something else happened, subtle enough that only someone with a critical eye would see it. A tiny hinge formed along one boning channel at the side. Not a tear, not yet. A kink — a promise. Charlie felt it at the same instant Mara saw it. His jaw tightened. Mara didn’t react with disappointment, but with satisfaction.

“There,” she said, almost pleased. “Second-order failure. That’s the real work showing itself.”

Charlie let out a breath that sounded almost like a laugh... small, disbelieving.

“We fixed one thing,” he said, “and revealed another.”

Mara nodded. “Exactly.”

Charlie went to the ledger and wrote without being told.

RESULT: improved load distribution at waist tie; reduced top edge roll under forward reach NEW FAILURE: hinge/kink at side boning channel under bend; pressure point emerging

He looked up. “Is that because I’m... too slim there?”

Mara’s gaze was cool, not unkind.

“It’s because you’re a baseline,” she said. “And baselines are useful precisely because they are not everyone.”

She leaned in, voice lowering into something like a vow.

“This,” she said, tapping the ledger, “is how we get the grail. Not by hoping. By mapping.”

Charlie stared at the page for a long second. Then he nodded, once, slow.

“Okay.”

This time it wasn’t compliance. It was commitment.

Celeste’s three “working stays” reference targets¶

These are ideal because they’re museum-documented, visibly work-worn / pragmatic, and they each teach a different kind of compromise.

London Museum (Museum of London) — Linen canvas stays with underarm guards, spiral lacing What Celeste can extract: abrasion management (the underarm guards), binding choices, and “honest” stiffness built for wear, not display. (London Museum)
London Museum — Brown cotton twill corset/stays with shoulder straps, centre-back holes What it teaches: a more utilitarian textile (twill), strap logic for working movement, and a shape that’s about control and support rather than decorative effect. (London Museum)
V&A Images — Late 18th-century stays in hard-wearing linen (“jean” linen) with silk What it teaches: the material truth of “pretty but durable” — robust cloth choices, and how refinement can ride on top of work-appropriate engineering without turning into lingerie. (Vandaimages)

Optional fourth (if you want Celeste to triangulate across continents):

MFA Boston — Brown stays with undyed linen lining, leather edging, linen tape seam coverings (reads like “built to last, repaired to last”). (Museum of Fine Arts Collections)

If you’d like, I can write a short Scene 15 mini-montage where Celeste brings these three examples back as bulletproof notes (“what they compromise”), and Mara immediately translates them into rules for the block system. That would make the research feel like power entering the room, not like homework.