adidas Club Women’s Tennis Shorts
About Mumbai
This port city occupies a reclaimed chain of islands on the Arabian Sea, built around one of the best natural harbors on India’s west coast. The Portuguese held the islands before they passed to the British crown in 1661 and then to the East India Company; the city grew as Bombay under colonial rule and was officially renamed Mumbai in 1995.
THE INTERNATIONAL REVIEW
Provenance first, always.
What you are holding is catalogued as one item and is in fact two: a regular-fit woven outer short with a tight-fit inner tight beneath it, and they are made of different things, which is precisely the sort of detail that gets flattened in a careless record.
The outer short is 100% recycled polyester dobby — dobby being a small geometric weave rather than a plain one, which is why it holds a little structure instead of collapsing against the leg. The inner tight is 91% recycled polyester with 9% elastane in a single jersey, so it stretches where the outer does not. Taken together the garment is at least 70% recycled content.
AEROREADY handles the moisture, moving it off the skin. There is an elastic waist with a drawcord, motion-enhancing cut lines through the leg, and split hems — side slits at the bottom edge that buy you a few extra degrees of stride when you are chasing a wide ball. adidas catalogue these for ball storage, and in practice that is the inner tight doing the work.
Sizes extra small through large.
Mumbai is a city with an obsessive filing habit and almost nobody notices.
We begin at the Gateway of India on the Apollo Bunder waterfront, an arch built to receive a king and best remembered now for the ships that left through it.
Out by launch, an hour, to the Elephanta Caves, where Shiva is carved three-headed straight from the living rock — not assembled, not installed, quarried in place, which means the sculpture and the building are the same object.
Back for Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus, gargoyles and a ribbed dome over the commuter platforms, a railway station catalogued as a cathedral by mistake and never corrected. And finally the Dhobi Ghat at Mahalaxmi, seen from the bridge: hundreds of open-air washing pens, and every garment in them comes home to the right household because each piece carries a hand-inked mark.
I would call that the finest working index in the city, and I do not say that lightly.
“Every bundle finds its own house again because somebody wrote on it. That is the whole discipline, in one riverbed.”
Two garments, one record. Now it is filed correctly.
LET adidas Club Women’s Tennis Shorts SHOW YOU Mumbai
Shorts: Entered in the Apollo Bunder ledger beside the Gateway of India, built to commemorate the 1911 visit of King George V and Queen Mary and completed in 1924. The shorts are filed under “mobility,” because unlike imperial paperwork, they appear ready to move.
Shorts: Shelf mark: Elephanta, rock-cut Shiva cave, famous for the three-headed Maheshmurti and now a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Some clerk once called this “stonework”; I have corrected it to “astonishing, please stop under-describing things.”
Shorts: Accession note: Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus, designed by F. W. Stevens and opened in 1887 as Victoria Terminus, later entered on the UNESCO World Heritage list. The gargoyles look like they have opinions about late returns; I respect their cataloguing discipline.
Shorts: Cross-reference Mahalaxmi Dhobi Ghat, where rows of open-air concrete wash pens are used by dhobis for hand-washing laundry. A lesser archivist would misfile the shorts under “textiles”; I file them under “likely to survive the spin cycle of history.”
Jackson Phillips here. Owner of TTT. We are working hard every day to bring you the most useful product reviews in the business. Our goal is putting the right product in every hand. If you have time, shoot me an email at jacksonphillips@thetennistactician.com and tell me exactly what you think of your purchase. The more feedback we get, the better we can serve. Thank you for your patronage. And Burn, Laugh, and Learn.