Cesar.

César bought the leather jacket at twenty-two, in Malacca, with money from Rahman's workshop. The first thing he bought with his own income — the first that didn't come from his mother or the apprentice's wage that barely covered food and transport.

He had just finished his four years of training with Encik Rahman. Four years sleeping in a room above the workshop, learning filigree and granulation, earning little and learning everything. When Rahman told him there was nothing more to teach him, César took the bus to PJ with a travel bag, the set of vanadium steel burins the master had given him, and a vague plan to open his own workshop. Before leaving Malacca he stopped at a secondhand shop. The jacket was on a rack among ten others. Caramel leather, bomber style, no lining. He tried it on, it fit well, it cost two weeks' wages. He bought it.

Since then he hasn't bought another outer garment. The jacket has survived fifteen years of monsoon, nighttime walks through SS2, and the workshop. He always wears it open — except when it rains, when he buttons it up to the top and walks faster. César's austerity with personal things isn't philosophical. It's practical. He lives in an apartment with a mattress on the floor, a rattan chair, and three cups of which he only uses one. What he spends, he spends on gold and silver for the workshop. The rest he can do without.

The color of the jacket — caramel, cognac, depending on the light — is the same you see in the portrait printed on this tote bag. Against César's black fur, the contrast is clean. Warm gold against absolute black. It's the combination that defines the character: the twenty-two-carat gold chain, the jacket, and everything else dark.

In Petaling Jaya, between November and February, the monsoon rains soak everything. Water gets in through any gap, humidity climbs to eighty percent and stays there. César buttons up the jacket, stores the tools from the loft in the safe, and orders slow down because clients don't go out. It's the time of year when he works on his own pieces — the ones no one has commissioned, the ones he makes because he wants to solve a technical problem or try an alloy. It's also when he walks at night the most, because after the rain the air is clean and SS2 smells different.

If you want the full story — from George Town to the ground-floor workshop —, [César's biography](https://www.yagopartal.com/animal-kinhood/cesar/) tells the whole thing.