In the small pocket of every jacket I own - the one nobody uses, the one most people don't know is there - lives a brass thimble. It's dented on one side from being dropped roughly nine thousand times, it's a size too big for my finger, and it has been to more fashion capitals than most editors. It belonged to my grandfather, who wore it every working day for fifty-one years in a shop in Tehran that smelled of chalk, pressed wool and very strong tea.
He gave it to me the summer I left. This was not a sentimental handover with speeches - he was Persian and a tailor, which means the feeling was enormous and the words were four. He put it in my palm, closed my fingers over it, and said: "So you remember what your hands are for." Then he told me my posture was bad, which in his dialect of affection meant he would miss me terribly.
The honest, slightly embarrassing truth is that I have never once needed it on a job. It doesn't fit, and when I sew - which I still do, weekly - I use a proper one in my size like a functioning adult. The thimble does not work as a thimble. It works as the other thing. Before a show, when the backstage noise gets aggressive and someone is shouting about a missing shoe, I put my hand in that pocket and hold a small brass fact: people in my family make things carefully, and have for a long time, and this is just another kind of making.
He died three winters ago, at ninety-one, having outlived two shahs' worth of history, four sewing machines and every one of his rivals, which pleased him enormously. At the funeral, my mother told me he used to show clients a photo from my first campaign and say, "My grandson - he's in the garment business." He never once called it modelling. He was right, of course. He usually was about anything you could measure.
The thimble has never been needed. It has never been left at home. Both of those things are true, and both of them are the point.