They are not looking for value.
But the stitching on the left lapel was wrong. The buttonholes were machine-finished, not hand-sewn. Thorne had been told it was authentic. His gut said otherwise. His gut had lost him three million pounds the previous year, but it had never lied about cloth.
He was there to verify. Marcus Thorne was a hedge fund manager with a religious devotion to provenance. He had recently acquired a 1938 dinner jacket from the estate of a deceased Austrian baron. The label read Parker & Co., Mayfair . No first name. No date. Just a serial number: A-SC-47 . Steve parker allen silver checked
“The cloth was cut in 1947 at the Allen mill. It was sold to a tailor in Vienna—Böhm & Sohn. That tailor made three jackets from this bolt. I’ve seen the other two. This is not one of them.”
Silence.
“See the pad stitching? That’s a machine. A Singer 45K. Didn’t exist until 1955. Someone took original Allen Silver deadstock and made a fake jacket in the 1960s. The baron’s name was added later. Probably forgeries of the label, too.”
“I did,” Steve Parker said.
“The cloth is real,” Parker said. “The jacket is not.”