The tag in the side seam

The last thing that happens to a Zouhi piece is the smallest. A cotton tag, no wider than a thumbnail, is sewn into the side seam — and on it, written by hand, is a number.

Seventeen of fifty. Three of forty. Whatever that piece happens to be.

Why the number exists at all

Before a pattern is cut we decide how many of that design will ever be made. Not a forecast, not a first run with more to follow if it sells. A number, fixed, decided at the start.

It comes from two things: how much of a particular cloth we could actually get, and how long the finishing takes. Snowdrop's hem is set with pearls sewn one at a time, so Snowdrop was never going to be a large edition. A simpler piece in a cloth we can source reliably can be larger. Neither number has anything to do with how well we think it might sell.

That decision is the whole architecture of the house. It is why we do not restock, why we do not bring a design back in a new colour the following season, and why the price on the first number is the price on the last. There is no reason to discount something when there was never going to be more of it.

Who writes it

The number is written by the person who finished the piece. Not printed at the start of a run, not stamped in batches — written at the end, by the one who did the work.

It is a small thing and it matters more than it should. It means the tag records something true: that this particular dress passed through a particular pair of hands on a particular afternoon, in a small workshop outside Kochi where everything is cut, sewn and finished in one place.

It also means that No. 17 and No. 18 are not identical objects. The cloth is the same and the pattern is the same, but a hand-drawn ruffle falls differently every time, and the tag is the only place the house admits it.

What happens to the last one

When the final number is sewn and sent, the design retires. The pattern goes into a drawer and stays there.

We do not make it again. Not in another colour, not the following spring, not because somebody asked. If you own it, you own one of a finite number of them, and that number stopped moving the day we decided it.

It is the least visible thing we make, and the only one that decides everything else.

Where to look

Inside the left seam, roughly at hip height on a frock, at the waist on a co-ord. Turn the piece inside out and it will be there — cotton, soft, deliberately unobtrusive.

It is not a label asking to be noticed. It is a record.