Not long ago, I got an e-mail from a man thanking me for mentioning his label, Pointer Brand, in an article in 2006. This was no thank-you note. I read on: “With a lot of hard work and persistence, we recently celebrated 100 years of manufacturing in Bristol Tennessee.” It was signed: “Jack King, fourth generation, L. C. King Manufacturing Company.”

Before I took the bait and called him, I looked up the article. Pointer makes work clothes that are part of the rural South: a light canvas jacket worn into the field in the morning and removed as the sun rises, dungarees and overalls of various types depending on well-marked preferences: low-back in Kentucky, high-back in Georgia. But these details I learned later. My article merely stated that the designer Junya Watanabe had modified some Pointer jackets for his men’s line. These changes, funnily, were not unlike the careful and ingenious improvements that farmers used to make on their old clothes, except the Watanabe deluxe versions started at $800.

The people at the Tennessee factory were oblivious of all this. Oh, they knew a Japanese firm had requested some items, but they never took the trouble to find out more. Not indifferent but perhaps numb is a better description of Jack King’s response, because indeed he did crave a connection to high fashion.

It was hard not to be impressed by the position he was in: he owned a factory in the South that hadn’t been modernized, which in the eyes of sophisticates made it a diamond in the rough, and yet, to him, in 2006, it often felt like a lump of iron strapped to his back. As I soon discovered, he came to the factory reluctantly, in 1999, when his father, Riley, became ill. Jack was in his dream job in Atlanta, at a food broker, he said, “studying the French fry market for the Pacific Rim.”