/fa/ - Fashion

“Exactly. Pants, but only just the right ones. We could never have engineered so powerful a locus of consumer desire. It’s like sex in a bottle.”

“Not for me.”

“You’re female.”

“They want to be soldiers?”

“Not to be. To self-identify as. However secretly. To imagine they may be mistaken for, or at least associated with. Virtually none of these products will ever be used for anything remotely like what they were designed for. Of course that’s true of most of the contents of your traditional army-navy store. Whole universes of wistful male fantasy in those places. But the level of consumer motivation we’re seeing, the fact that these are often what amount to luxury goods, and priced accordingly. That’s new. I felt like a neurosurgeon, when this was brought to my attention, discovering a patient whose nervous system is congenitally and fully exposed. It’s just so nakedly obvious. Fantastic, really.”

“And it ties into military contracting?”

“Deeply, though not simply. A lot of the same players, where the stuff actually originates. But your civilian buyer, your twenty-first-century Walter Mitty, needs it the way a mod, in this street, in 1965, needed the right depth of vent on a suitcoat.”

“It sounds ridiculous to me.”

“Almost exclusively a boy thing.”

“Almost,” she agreed, remembering Heidi’s IDF bra.