In the film The Pursuit of Happyness (review here), there’s a scene where Will Smith’s character arrives late for an interview with a stock brokerage firm and has no shirt on. The conversation goes like this:
Martin Frohm: What would you say if man walked in here with no shirt, and I hired him? What would you say?
Christopher Gardner: He must have had on some really nice pants.
Well, what would you say if you interviewed someone and they wore a suit looking like this?
This is the end result of a project undertaken by Kelly Cobb, an educator and designer at Drexel University. The task was to try and create a suit using only materials and workers within a 100-mile radius. Here’s the full story from Wired (HT: Mises Economics Blog).
As the piece relates, “Cobb’s locally made suit turned into a exhausting task. The suit took a team of 20 artisans several months to produce — 500 man-hours of work in total — and the finished product wears its rustic origins on its sleeve.”
Seriously, it looks like an Unfrozen Caveman Lawyer suit or something. The exercise is really an object lesson in “the massive manufacturing power of the global economy.”
For most of us, that’s a good thing. Others, though, might think that “how far removed we are from what we wear” is an overwhelmingly negative feature of modern existence.
But if nothing else, the 100-mile suit should offend your aesthetic, if not your moral, sensibilities.