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Tuesday

We landed a kilometre from the site and then hacked our way to the front gates through thick jungle. It’s the most fair-trade, low-footprint factory in Southeast Asia, but Steven Kurtz, the facility’s manager, has not quite been the same since we transferred him here in 2004. He greeted me with a bizarre diatribe on their egalitarian hiring practices. “You have to have workers who are moral … and at the same time who are able to utilize their primordial instincts to create fabric without feeling, without passion … without judgment. Because it’s judgment that defeats us.” “Steven,” I interrupted. “The fabric … it’s too sheer.” He fixed me with a steady, unsettling gaze. “There is nothing wrong with the fabric, Christine.”

Wednesday

Steven was right. The fabric was perfect. For 32 straight hours, myself and 40 of my most trusted employees sequestered ourselves at headquarters and tried on box after box of the defective pants. We ran through every yoga pose we could think of: cobras, planks, forward folds, downward dog — but damn it, not a speck of sheerness. After two aides collapsed from exhaustion, I buzzed my secretary to bring in another tray of bananas and CLIF bars. She came in wearing a pair of our black Astro Pants and, as I looked closer, I realized they left nothing to the imagination: They were as sheer as a mountain stream. “Carol,” I demanded. “What size do you wear?” “Eight, normally,” she said. “But the great thing about Lululemon pants is that I fit into a two.” Could it be? Have I bet the company on a planet of Carols jamming themselves into undersized pants?