Reach behind you and feel the strap. Go on. One piece, elastic, shaped like a Y, sitting between your shoulder blades — and now lift your arm over your head. Nothing catches. Nothing pulls. That is the entire idea, and it is the reason this dress has a letter in its name instead of a slogan. The Y-Dress is built around getting fabric out of the way of a serve.
Here is what the line holds constant, run after run: the single elastic Y-strap across the back, positioned to free the shoulders; a slim fit through the chest that flares into an A-shape so the skirt is never the thing you are thinking about; and a separate pair of short tights underneath, sold with the dress rather than sewn into it.
The Prime in the name points at adidas's Prime materials programme — Primegreen and Primeblue, their recycled-materials series, with Primeblue made in part from Parley Ocean Plastic. Across every Y-Dress run I was able to open, the shell is a recycled polyester and elastane knit carrying a substantial majority of recycled content.
Which of those runs this particular dress belongs to, I could not confirm from a source I trust, and I am not going to stand up in front of you and read out a percentage I have not seen. You will get honesty from me or you will get nothing, and honesty is the better product.
Now let me take you somewhere nobody has heard of, because that is where the lesson lives. Lobez.
A small Polish town that has never once been anybody's destination.
Walk into the Gothic Church of the Sacred Heart of Jesus and look at what the tower is standing on: erratic boulders, stones dragged there by ice long before anyone thought to build on them, put to work as a foundation. Somebody looked at the rubble the landscape handed them and said, that is the base.
Fragments. Not a wall — pieces of one. And they are still standing, which is more than can be said for the parts that were built to a lower standard.
Then walk the lanes off the centre and find the surviving fragments of the fifteenth-century town wall.
At ulica Niepodleglosci 7 there is a timber-framed house with its beams still exposed, still holding, still doing the job the carpenter set it. And up on Wzgorze Rolanda they raised an earth mound in 1926 and put a memorial column on top of it, which is what a town does when it has decided to remember something on purpose.
“The wall is a fragment. The fragment is still standing. Be the fragment.”
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