For the past two years, photographer Maya Linh has travelled from city to city with a simple request: let her take your portrait, and tell her the story behind the clothes you are wearing. The project, now a touring exhibition, began almost by accident, when she noticed a stranger's jacket that still carried the faint outline of a name stitched inside the collar. "A garment holds a kind of memory," she explains, "and a portrait can trigger that memory for a complete stranger too." Her subjects are assembled from markets, repair shops and secondhand stores across the country, and each sits for a formal portrait that is published exclusively through the exhibition, never sold.

Linh's method is simple but effective. A subject stands slightly turned from a single window light while she prompts them with one open question: what does this piece remind you of? The answers she has recorded range from a grandmother's wedding dress to a football shirt worn during a single unforgettable match. What the portraits demonstrate, she argues, is that an item of clothing is never just a component of an outfit; it is a link to a moment, a place, or a person a subject may never see again. Visitors often recall a nearly identical memory of their own the moment they recognise a familiar print or a particular mode of stitching.

The project's implications reach well beyond art. It arrives at a moment when the fast-fashion industry faces mounting pressure over its environmental record. Each year, factories extract enormous quantities of raw material to manufacture garments that are often worn only a handful of times before being discarded, and campaigners claim that an industry built on constant turnover cannot credibly call itself sustainable while it still treats clothing as disposable. A recent survey of young shoppers found that most would rather purchase something that shows its history than something brand new, provided the fit and price are right — a habitat, almost, for secondhand style rather than a last resort.

Supporters of what is now widely called the circular economy say the real shift is one of principle: before buying new, a shopper should first consider whether a secondhand purchase could serve the same purpose equally well. For many of Linh's subjects, ownership itself is changing. Fewer people, she has noticed, want to own a garment forever; more want to borrow it, repair it, or eventually turn to someone else who might wear it better. Her exhibition does not claim that one portrait can eliminate an entire industry's waste, but she hopes it can nudge a visitor toward noticing what is already hanging, unworn, in their own wardrobe.

Not every habit is easy to change, of course. Convenience still drives most purchasing decisions, and a garment that has simply worn out is usually replaced without a second thought. Even so, Linh believes humanity's relationship with clothing can shift course gradually, one portrait at a time, and she plans to extend the project to several more cities before the exhibition closes next year. "I am not superior to anyone who buys new," she says. "I only want people to notice the story a little longer before they let it go."

A For most of human history, washing the hands before eating or after visiting the sick was not understood as a defence against disease at all. The idea that invisible bacteria could travel from one person to another and make them ill did not take hold until the nineteenth century. Before that, handwashing — where it was practised at all — belonged to religion, manners or simple comfort rather than medicine. Ironically, some of the earliest recorded hygiene rituals were motivated almost entirely by a wish to appear respectable in front of guests, not by any concern for health.

B Several ancient civilisations treated bathing as something close to a luxury, reserved for the wealthy or for special occasions such as a wedding or a religious festival. Public bathhouses, common across much of the ancient world, doubled as places to meet friends and settle business matters as much as to get clean. Soap itself, when it existed, was often a scarce and expensive product rather than an everyday item, which meant that for most ordinary people, a thorough wash remained an occasional luxury rather than a daily habit.

C During the medieval period in Europe, attitudes shifted again, and not for the better. Water, particularly in crowded towns, was frequently considered a danger in itself, blamed — sometimes fairly, sometimes not — for spreading illness through open pores in the skin. Bathing declined sharply as a result, and people instead relied on perfume and on clothing stiff with layers of linen to mask odour and absorb sweat. A full bath might be taken only a handful of times a year, a limitation that looks remarkable by today's standards.

D The breakthrough came in the nineteenth century, when physicians such as Ignaz Semmelweis began to suspect that doctors were themselves transferring deadly infections between patients. His insistence that colleagues wash their hands between examinations was met with ridicule at first, yet it transformed outcomes on his own hospital ward almost immediately. Once bacteria were identified under a microscope and firmly linked to specific diseases, medical opinion adapted quickly: handwashing moved from an optional courtesy to a critical, non-negotiable step in any procedure, and hospitals began to design sinks, taps and gowns specifically around the new understanding of germs.

E The twentieth century turned hygiene into an industry in its own right. Soap was mass-produced and marketed as essential to a nutritious, healthy lifestyle, and advertisers linked cleanliness directly to social status. Not every innovation proved beneficial, however; some early antiseptic products had a serious drawback, damaging the very skin they were meant to preserve, and manufacturers had to rebalance formulas repeatedly to limit that harm. Despite such limitations, by the middle of the century regular handwashing had become a norm taught to every schoolchild, a habit few people in earlier centuries would have recognised as normal at all.

F Hygiene habits continue to adapt today. Public restrooms now commonly use wire-sensor taps that respond without being touched at all, a flexible design intended to reduce the spread of germs during outbreaks. During recent health crises, hand sanitiser briefly became scarce worldwide, and crowded cities saw residents queue for a bottle the way earlier generations once queued for scarce soap. Whether the lesson finally breaks down old habits for good, or simply fades once the crisis passes, remains an open question historians will keep watching.

Every generation produces its own list of remarkable business leaders, and every list seems to disagree about what actually made them successful. Some observers credit raw ambition: a leader who is ambitious enough to pursue a goal that others consider unrealistic, undeterred by an early setback. Others point instead to character, arguing that a leader earns loyalty not through aggressive confidence but through being genuinely supportive of the people doing the daily work. Both views contain some truth, and neither on its own fully explains why a workforce chooses to follow one determined individual over another who appears, on paper, equally qualified.

Consider the common image of the assertive founder who disrupts an entire industry single-handedly. It is a tempting story, and it certainly carries obvious appeal to investors eager to back the next remarkable idea. Yet most research into successful companies finds a different, less dramatic pattern: a leader who built a network of capable people, secured steady relationships with suppliers, and was willing to contemplate advice that contradicted their own first instinct. A gap often exists between the leader celebrated in the media and the far less visible team that actually kept the supply chain, the finances and the daily operations running.

Harmful leadership, by contrast, tends to share a recognisable texture regardless of industry: a reluctance to share credit, an unwillingness to adjust course after a clear setback, and a habit of treating current employees as replaceable rather than valuable. Such leaders often appear assertive and confident from a distance, yet internally they struggle to retain staff, and the company's culture gradually loses whatever made it distinctive in the first place. An organisation led this way may still look secure on paper for a year or two, propped up by past investment, before the underlying damage becomes impossible to ignore.

What, then, actually separates an effective leader from a merely confident one? Evidence increasingly points to a willingness to pursue a long-term goal while remaining genuinely open to being wrong about the details along the way. A leader worth following treats a setback as information rather than as a personal insurance claim against blame, adjusts the plan, and credits the people who helped identify the problem early. This is a far less cinematic story than the lone, disruptive genius, but it is a far more common — and more reliable — one among companies that remain successful for decades rather than a single remarkable quarter.

None of this means ambition is unimportant; an organisation led by someone who refuses to pursue anything beyond the current quarter rarely achieves anything remarkable at all. The real distinction lies in what a leader does with that ambition: whether it is channelled into genuinely supportive relationships with a team and a network of partners, or spent entirely on image. Readers searching for a simple formula will likely be disappointed, but the evidence suggests that durable leadership is less about appealing to a crowd and more about quietly securing the trust of the people doing the work.