By Cathy Horyn
Not long ago, I got an e-mail from a man thanking me for mentioning his label, Pointer Brand, in an article in 2006. This was no thank-you note. I read on: “With a lot of hard work and persistence, we recently celebrated 100 years of manufacturing in Bristol Tennessee.” It was signed: “Jack King, fourth generation, L. C. King Manufacturing Company.”
Before I took the bait and called him, I looked up the article. Pointer makes work clothes that are part of the rural South: a light canvas jacket worn into the field in the morning and removed as the sun rises, dungarees and overalls of various types depending on well-marked preferences: low-back in Kentucky, high-back in Georgia. But these details I learned later. My article merely stated that the designer Junya Watanabe had modified some Pointer jackets for his men’s line. These changes, funnily, were not unlike the careful and ingenious improvements that farmers used to make on their old clothes, except the Watanabe deluxe versions started at $800.
