KAVŞAK · 28 AUGUST 2066
Cut for the ladder
In New Batavia the working day crosses the waterline a dozen times, and the wardrobe has had to answer for it. Five garments, and the makers who decided what they are for.
Above: The Rumah Surut tide coat, cut to finish at the hip bone so nothing sits in the water on the ladder. Eleven cutters, three sizes, two pattern revisions in nine years. Rewaxed at the co-op's own bench for about a tenth of the purchase price.
The Shelf opens at low tide and closes when the water says so. For roughly ninety minutes in between, the market that sits on the rooftops of drowned Jakarta runs at full speed, and several hundred people go up and down aluminium ladders carrying things they cannot afford to drop. Watch that for one morning and the local wardrobe stops looking like style and starts looking like a set of answers.
New Batavia is a city built at elevation whose economy is not. The working day crosses the waterline repeatedly: the harbor row at eight, the Shelf when the tide allows it, the tram back up to High Thirty at dusk with salt still in your cuffs. Very little sold into this city survives long if it was designed for a dry one. Five garments people here actually buy, and the decisions behind them.
1. The tide coat. Rumah Surut, the Shelf. An eleven-cutter co-op working out of two rooms above a vendor row, Rumah Surut makes one jacket in three sizes and has revised the pattern twice in nine years. Waxed cotton canvas, cut to finish at the hip bone, with the front closure offset to the left so the storm flap sheds water down the body instead of into it.
The hem is the whole argument. Wulan Hidayat, who cuts most of them, spent her first two years making a longer version because customers kept asking for one, then stopped. "Anything below the hip is a sponge," she says. "You come up the ladder carrying four kilos of seawater you did not buy." The wax gets remelted and reapplied at the co-op's own bench every dry season, at about a tenth of the price of the coat, and that service is what brings people back more than the cutting does. A tide coat is 340 PFZ credits. Hidayat's own is eleven years old and on its fourth rewax.
2. The Sundoro deck shoe. Sundoro & Daughter, High Thirty. The rooftops of the Old City are tiled, and after twenty-one years underwater those tiles carry an algal film that behaves like oil. Bayu Sundoro's answer is a siped sole: the outsole is cut with sixty-odd fine slits that open under load and let water escape from beneath the foot rather than trapping it. Racing sailors settled this problem well over a century ago. Nobody was making it in the Scatter at a price a Shelf porter could pay.
The upper is undyed canvas with a leather toe cap, plain to the point of anonymity, and the shoe is built to come apart. Tirta Sundoro runs the resoling bench at the back of the shop, turns a pair around in four days, and charges a third of the price of new. Resoles are about sixty percent of the shop's annual volume, which is the number that tells you the shoes are being kept rather than replaced. "A shoe you throw away is a shoe I got wrong," her father says.
3. The boarding commission. Mark Hand Studio, Samudra Sattva. Mark Hand works on commission only and quotes six months, and the wait is not theatre: a jacket cut for an augmented or gene-forged body needs three fittings, because the body is still settling between the first one and the last. Nur Basuki, a Saltwater Croc harbor pilot who spent nine years on Corsair boarding teams, ordered his after retiring off the water. He describes it as the first garment he has owned that did not have to be attacked with scissors before he could wear it.
Ayu Prawira, the studio's head cutter, builds the back in four panels instead of two, carries the dorsal ridge on a raised centre seam, and sets a gusset across the shoulder blades that opens when he reaches. The armhole sits higher than it looks like it should. That is the part that keeps the hem down when the arms go up, and it is the part every copyist gets wrong. The jacket cost what a small boat costs. Basuki wears it to conn tankers into the harbor and to eat dinner afterward, and considers the arithmetic settled.
4. Undyed cotton, unimproved. ORIGINAL EQUIPMENT. The house sells one thing, undyed long-staple cotton in a single 210-gram plain weave, no logo and no finish, and its New Batavia buyers have asked repeatedly for water repellency. The house has declined for eleven years. The stubbornness turns out to be right here for an unglamorous reason: salt rinses out of undyed cloth and marks dyed cloth permanently, so an OE shirt rained on twice still looks like a shirt, while a dyed one looks like a chart of where it has been. Shopkeepers on the harbor row wear them for exactly that. So does a certain kind of Council staffer. The price is not modest, and what it buys is a cloth that ages legibly and a company that keeps refusing to add anything to it.
5. The vendor smock, in the original cut. The Shelf. STATION WEAR built a business on a garment the Interchange vendors invented and nobody had thought to register: a hip-length smock whose chest pockets are arranged for making change while standing. On the Shelf, vendors buy theirs two rows over from Hesti Wirasmo, who was sewing them before the label existed and charges 95 credits.
Hers carries one pocket the registered version does not, an inside slit at the left ribs sized to the transit chit every vendor has to produce on demand. She runs a second row of stitching at each pocket mouth, because that is where they fail. "They copied the shape," she says of the label, without any heat in it. "The shape was never the hard part." She sells about forty a month, most of them to people replacing one they wore out.
The correspondent's kit. Four days here in August, with the monsoon arriving every afternoon at about the same hour: one tide coat, bought on the first morning after ruining something longer; the Sundoro deck shoe; two OE shirts; and a dry bag for everything that would not survive being wrong about the weather. The failure was a very good jacket from Kavşak, beautifully cut, finishing at the knee. It is hanging in a room at High Thirty and it will be dry sometime next week.
Above: Nur Basuki, nine years on Corsair boarding teams, in the Mark Hand commission. Four panels across the back, a gusset between the shoulder blades, and an armhole set high enough that the hem stays down when his arms go up.