The Orion is an old name and it wears its age like a hill wears heather — not hiding it, exactly, but not making a performance of it either.

Since the 1980s these trousers have been on tennis champions and on the terraces, adopted by the British casuals and by half a dozen subcultures who never asked the brand's permission, and that is the strange, beautiful afterlife of a good design: it stops belonging to the people who made it.

The cloth is a brushed diver fabric — dense, smooth, with a raised nap on the face that catches the light the way water catches it just before it goes flat — and it carries a subtle stretch, so the trouser follows the leg instead of arguing with it. The waistband is a soft rib-knit that sits without digging.

And at the ankle there are adjustable zip openings, which is the practical little hinge on which the whole garment turns: zipped closed the line is clean and narrow, unzipped they go over a shoe without the hopping-about that ruins the last five minutes of any evening. What this is not is a technical performance trouser.

It has no weather rating and no compression.

It is a track pant, and its purpose is the hour before and the hour after — the hours, if I may, that the match is only a punctuation mark inside.

The castle sits on a volcanic plug, which is to say a town grew up around a piece of ancient violence and called it home. The Church of the Holy Rude was founded in 1129.

Stirling stands on its rock like a held note.

Mar's Wark stands roofless on Broad Street, a Renaissance frontage with sky behind the windows — a face with nothing left behind it, and somehow more moving for that. And the Wallace Monument goes two hundred and twenty feet up Abbey Craig, a stone exclamation mark visible from everywhere.

A design outlives the people who chose it. That is the only immortality clothing gets.

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