She was wearing a neat old ladies’ coat that must have been a hand-me-down or a chance find at Good Sammy’s. It looked great with 501s. Then after lunch I’m walking through the med building and there’s the same jacket. The jeans are nu-skool now. It’s a different person. Do you see? That same jacket is everywhere. It’s taking over the world like sartorial kudzu. Except - and this is the ironic bit - it was meant to look like something you dug out of mum’s wardrobe. As in, why has it suddenly multiplied? It was a rare and precious moth-eaten flower, now it’s clogging and polluting our waterways. It’s overshading crops and destroying native habitat. This jacket that we once loved so dearly is a menace.

Like there was the story of the orchid that only grew on the side of a parched, rocky mountain. But mutated cloned copied and exploded out of all proportion (whether by the sun’s heat or by terrorist cadres) is now clawing its way up through every crack in the city’s pavement. Subsisting in the dark recesses of showers and beneath six out of ten household refrigerators.

You can no longer tell the genuine article from the reproduction. Even grabbing this girl - this woman - by the collar and questioning the label will not be conclusive. The fake has made every original into a fake as well. If, once upon a time, someone pulled a dusty coat out of a closet somewhere and tried it on, we don’t want to know about it. Random act of retro, that. We have teams of technicians pulling everything they can out of a thousand closets hoping to find something that looks just as good with 501s. We will copy down the pattern when we find it, toss the old material. Then manufacture them pre-stressed.

Everything feels like a copy of a copy of a copy.

The world is not safe for your eyes.