From the workshop, Sunday afternoon #7

I think a lot about authenticity.

The word has been handled so much it has almost gone soft, like a coin worn smooth in too many pockets. Everyone claims it, everyone craves it. Most of what gets called authentic is set dressing: a font, a sepia photograph, a filter, a paragraph about heritage written by someone who has never sewn a seam. The signal to noise ratio. The wheat from the chaff. Not to wax lyrical about the past and romanticise the good ‘ole days, but, imagine: there actually was a time when it was literally just a given, that what you bought was well made, authentically produced and simply intentional. That was a time that did exist and it wasn’t even that long ago. Jean Baudrillard would discuss the simulacra. The simulation - the place we are in now, where reality is almost a copy of reality past.

Then Palantir released a chore coat.

If you missed it: Palantir is a publicly listed surveillance and defence software company. They build the data systems behind a lot of the modern state - targeting, immigration enforcement, the back end of war. In April they dropped a $350 chore coat. American bull denim, made in the USA, three pockets, sold out in a day. The product copy talks about rugged workwear and the company's "forward deployed culture". One of their people called it “great for activities”.

It would be easy to make this about politics, and it is not. It is about clothes, manufacturing, craftsmanship and about what clothes & even objects are for.

A chore coat is one of the oldest working garments there is. The French call it the bleu de travail - the blue of work. It was the coat of the railwayman, the farmer, the mechanic. Three patch pockets. A man working with his hands needs somewhere to put his hands and his tools. The colour was purely practical, chosen because the rich, indigo colour is highly effective at masking the dirt and grease of manual labour. Hell, the coat and its colour led to the very term blue collar worker. The whole object means one thing, plainly and without trying: I work, and I work with my hands, and this coat simply & precisely fits my needs.

That is the garment a company that builds targeting software decided to wear and to signal.

The further you get from the work, the more you need the costume. This is the part worth sitting with. A man who actually spends his day in a workshop does not need a coat that announces it. The coat is just what he reaches for. It gets engine oil on it, the pockets sag, and eventually it carries the shape of him. The meaning accumulates. It is not applied, not purchased. Whereas if your actual product is abstraction - the dashboard, the data layer, the thing that happens to other people somewhere you will never have to look - then you might need a denim coat to remind yourself and everyone else that you are grounded, rugged, deployed.

The coat ends up doing the work the work cannot.

Someone made the sharpest point about all of it. He said the problem is that you cannot wink at this, because Palantir actually is the thing. A small streetwear label can sell ironic military merch from the outside, with a bit of detachment, and everyone understands the joke. But when you are the company building the systems, the irony has nowhere to stand. You are wearing the worker's coat while being, precisely, the management.

Here is what I actually take from it, sitting in my own workshop with my own finite cloth, surrounded by machines right out of the Industrial Revolution.

Authenticity is not a layer. You cannot apply it at the end like a wax finish. It is actually the residue. It is what is left over from years of doing the actual thing. Perhaps badly at first, then less badly, with your own hands, on your own time, making the mistakes and wearing them. You cannot buy your way back to it, and you cannot brand your way into it. The harder you try, the more obvious the gap becomes. The material either has a history or it does not. The maker either made it or did not. No amount of bull denim closes that distance.

And the trap is open to all of us. It is open to me. The danger for any small maker is the same danger, just smaller and quieter: that you let the story get bigger than the making. That you start selling the provenance harder than you sell the object. I have 700 metres or so of irreplaceable oilskin canvas and a tendency to romance, and I have to watch that the romance never outruns the work that earns it. The discipline is actually keeping the two the same size. The story should be exactly as big as the thing, and not one metre bigger.

So that is the test I keep coming back to. Not whether something is American made, Australian made, or hand finished, or rugged, or heritage, or any of the words. The test is simpler. Did the person selling it to you do the thing. Did their hands ever touch the work. Would the object exist in roughly this form if there were no one to sell it to, because someone needed it and made it?

A chore coat passes that test for a hundred years and then fails it in a single drop.

Anyway. I will be here, three pockets short of forward deployed, trying to deserve the material and do the work.

With appreciation,

Nick.