The open hem.

Every trouser Aevon makes leaves the workroom unfinished at the ankle. The linen is woven in Ireland and cut in Portugal, and then stopped one operation short of complete, with the raw edge left exactly as the cutter left it.

This is ordinary in tailoring and close to extinct everywhere else. A ready-made trouser arrives at a length somebody settled on as an average, which is a number chosen to fit a great many people slightly wrong rather than any one person properly. Rise, break and the shoe all move that number, and a factory knows none of the three.

An open hem hands the decision back. A tailor sets it in about twenty minutes for the price of a good lunch, and the trouser then hangs the way it was drawn: touching the shoe at the front, clearing it behind, with a single break or none at all depending on what you asked for.

There is a second reason, which is time. A hem that was set once can be set again. The same trouser can be shortened for a different shoe in its fifth year, or let down if it was cut generously to begin with. A factory hem, cut off and locked, can do neither.