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Chouara Tannery
Adidas London Tennis Dress: Yeah, the smell. You get used to it — you don't. Chouara has been running since roughly the eleventh century and it's the largest of the three tanneries left in Fes el-Bali. Cow, sheep, goat and camel hides go into the white vats first, which are a caustic mixture traditionally including lime and pigeon droppings, and that softens the leather and loosens the hair. Then the coloured pits, where the dyes get worked in by foot: poppy for red, saffron for yellow, indigo for blue, mint for green. Basically unchanged since the medieval period. It all supplies the babouche and bag and jacket workshops around us. The vats were drained and repaired in a restoration finished in 2016. I read about it. Once.
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Merenid Tombs
Adidas London Tennis Dress: Broken walls on a hill. Fine, I guess. It's the necropolis of the Marinid dynasty, who ruled Morocco from Fes between the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries, and Leo Africanus saw them in the early sixteenth century and wrote that the marble facing and the elaborate epitaphs were already falling into decay, which, bleak. What's left is two ruined mausolea of rubble and lime, stripped of decoration by weather and quarrying. So the point isn't the ruins any more, it's the view: the whole labyrinth of Fes el-Bali, the green roofs of Qarawiyyin, the tanneries, all of it below the Borj Nord. Everyone comes up here at sunset. I might stay. Not for that reason.
They will tell you the Adidas London Tennis Dress is "just a tennis dress". Sure. Just a dress — with a sleek Y-shaped racerback, a built-in bra, included shorts, a flowy hem, and a slim fit in 75% recycled polyester and 25% elastane with moisture-wicking tech. All of that is verifiable; I have read the label, and the label is the one document they cannot redact.
But ask yourself this: the print is "Morse code-inspired". Inspired. So there is a message on the dress and nobody official will say what it reads. I am not saying it is next season's club draw. I am saying it is dots and dashes, and somebody wrote them.
Which brings us to Fes. Allegedly an old city. Allegedly. In 1350 a Marinid sultan put up the Bou Inania Madrasa and, across the street, a water clock — thirteen windows, thirteen brass bowls — and in the centuries since, nobody has convincingly explained how the thing worked. Not lost plans. Not a breakdown. Never convincingly explained.
And the same sultan is supposed to have thrown the construction accounts into the river because beauty is beyond price. Sure it is. Follow the money. Except you cannot, because he binned the receipts.
Fes gets better. Al-Qarawiyyin was founded in 857 by one woman, Fatima al-Fihri, and has been granting degrees ever since, longer than any institution on earth, and its library reopened in 2016 holding a ninth-century Quran.
At the Chouara Tannery they have been softening hides in lime and pigeon droppings since about the eleventh century and dyeing them with poppy, saffron, indigo and mint, and the method has barely changed, which is either tradition or somebody making very sure nothing gets written down.
Up on the hill the Merenid Tombs are roofless shells with the clearest view over the whole medina, which is precisely where you would site an observation post. Wear it everywhere from a club court to the climb up that hill, blend in, and by the way it is also perfect for a hot afternoon in Fes when you would rather nobody looked twice.
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