Perfect purity is to white fabric as perfect health is to the human body: unattainable. Certain varieties of cotton, such as Egyptian cotton, Jean-Claude explains, have an intrinsic yellow hue, and most fabrics are finished in a process known as azurage that adds the slightest tincture of color — traditionally blue, hence the name, but sometimes a shade closer to lilac. A white, then, is never truly a white. Jean-Claude and Anne-Marie pull bolts off the wall, place them next to each other in pairs, and insist that I touch each and every one. Woven from gossypium barbadense cotton found only in the delta of the Nile, most are made exclusively for Charvet. A lighter poplin or a heavier poplin? Heavier. More shine or less shine? Less. ‘‘Look at them, feel them,’’ Jean-Claude tells me, ‘‘and you will have a preference.’’ Indeed you will.

Of course, the choices one makes en route to a uniform of one’s own design also reflect the choices of the past. Charvet keeps a record of each client, and at some point, I notice that mine reads ‘‘Jake McAuley,’’ even though most everyone now calls me James. Jake was the 18-year-old who came into the store with his dad almost 10 years ago, the kid who spent most of that summer reading Fitzgerald but really just staring at oiled, topless Daisy Buchanans on French beaches and believing he would soon write the Great American Novel. Jake, it follows, chose the more casual white Oxford, whereas future iterations of James — collegiate man-child, fair-weather Rawlsian and, surprise, astoundingly pretentious seminar problematizer — opted for more versatile white poplins, opposed as he always was to commodity fetishism. Together, these shirts serve as a gallery of self-portraits, stitched and sewn introspections, probably my most sustained attempts at deducing the qualities lurking in the man I am still becoming. Today, I still choose a poplin. I am not yet sure what it means.