Ask us about the leather patch on the back of your jeans and clear your afternoon.

Somebody sat down and drew the leather patch on the back of your jeans by hand and most of us have never turned it over to look properly.

We've had a cut waistband pinned to the wall in the house since spring. It came off a pair somebody wore for 11 years and the patch has gone the colour of cold tea, cracked through the middle where it folded over a back pocket every single day. The engraving is half gone. It's better than it was new.

The Levi's two horse patch has been running since 1886, two animals hauling at a pair of trousers that refuse to tear, drawn in the register of a banknote because that's what persuasion looked like before photography did the arguing. Lee and Wrangler went their own directions from the same instinct. Fine line work, type set tight enough to hold at that size, an illustration making a promise about durability to somebody who might not stop to read the words.

Then the wearing begins, and that's where the design gets finished. Leather takes the shape of whatever you keep in your pocket. The ink lifts off the high points first, so the drawing thins from the middle out. Give it a decade and the thing is a record of one person's habits, which is not something you can put in a brand book.

You can tell instantly when nobody cared. A flattened logo, vectored clean, printed onto something synthetic that peels away in one piece rather than softening. It looks the same on day one and day nine hundred, which is the whole problem.

The good ones are drawn for a surface that will be sat on, washed, and ignored. That's a difficult brief and almost nobody notices it's been met.

The waistband's still on the wall. It'll carry on changing without us.

Shot of the good stuff.