My Cobra has no Cobra badges.
It was built in Kent in the early 1990s by Ian Walker, using a Pilgrim body and components from different sources. It looks like the car that inspired it, but Ian deliberately didn’t badge it as something it wasn’t.
There is another layer to its identity.
When a kit car is built in Britain, the registration it receives depends on what can be established about the chassis and major components used. Depending on what survives from a donor vehicle, it may retain a registration, receive an age-related registration, or be given the less desirable Q registration.
The object exists first. Then somebody has to decide what it is.
It was probably my first encounter with a question that has followed me into other things:
At what point does something become something else?
Years later, while servicing vintage mechanical military watches as a hobby, I encountered it again.
One of those watches makes the question particularly tangible.
Vertex Watches Ltd was registered in London and La Chaux-de-Fonds in 1916. During the Second World War, Vertex became the sole British-based manufacturer among the twelve companies that supplied the W.W.W. watches now known by collectors as the Dirty Dozen.
The others included Omega, IWC, Longines and Jaeger-LeCoultre.
The watches were made to a British military specification. Vertex was the British-based company in the group. Yet look at the bottom of the dial of my 1944–45 Vertex and there are two perfectly legitimate words:
SWISS MADE.
A British name. A British military contract. Swiss manufacture.
There is no contradiction.
But the rules governing those words today did not govern this watch.
Switzerland’s first ordinance specifically regulating the use of the Swiss name for watches came much later, in 1971. The requirement that at least 60% of the manufacturing costs of a complete watch be generated in Switzerland only came into force on 1 January 2017.
The marking came first. The legal definition followed.
Over time, Switzerland had to define more precisely what an object had to contain, and where the work had to happen, before those valuable words could be used.
More recently, developing the PIAFEIRA Touring Cap has brought me back to exactly the same question.
This time it is MADE IN UK.
British manufacturing can be surprisingly difficult to navigate. Extraordinary skills and factories remain, but capacity can be scarce, quantities difficult and costs high. Fabrics, leather, hardware and specialist components are routinely sourced internationally.
There is nothing inherently wrong with that.
In fact, one of the small coincidences of developing the Touring Cap has been the press stud.
The detachable chin strap requires one. While researching different fasteners, I acquired a quantity of old Newey press studs. Moulded into their brown faces, surrounding the Newey mark, are two wonderfully direct words:
ENGLISH MAKE.
A component the size of a fingernail carrying a deliberate statement about its make.
Placed beside the Vertex, the two objects seem to be doing opposite things.
The tiny Newey component names its own English manufacture. The complete Vertex watch carries a British name and British military history but tells you, quite openly, SWISS MADE.
Neither is dishonest.
That’s the interesting part.
The question has become particularly visible in Italy.
Under European customs rules, when more than one country participates in producing an object, its non-preferential origin is generally determined by where its last substantial, economically justified processing or working took place — resulting in a new product or representing an important stage of manufacture.
This does not mean that a finished garment can simply arrive from China, have a button or label attached in Italy and legitimately become Made in Italy. Minimal operations don’t normally confer origin.
But it does mean something more interesting:
Made in Italy does not necessarily mean everything was made in Italy.
A series of investigations in Milan has exposed how complicated the reality behind those words can be. Companies connected with Alviero Martini, Armani, Dior, Valentino and Loro Piana have been placed under judicial administration following investigations into alleged labour exploitation and shortcomings in oversight within their manufacturing supply chains.
Judicial administration is a preventive measure, not a criminal conviction of the brands themselves, and several of the measures have since been lifted after the companies took corrective action.
These were not simply cases of counterfeit MADE IN ITALY labels.
In several instances, production really was taking place in Italy, but through layers of contractors and subcontractors, eventually reaching Chinese-owned workshops operating on Italian soil.
The geographical claim could therefore remain legally correct while the complete story of the object’s manufacture was considerably more complicated than the three words might lead a customer to imagine.
That interests me far more than catching somebody using the wrong label.
A country-of-origin label can be legally true while telling only a fraction of an object’s story.
And Britain presents its own version of the problem.
There is no simple statutory percentage — no British equivalent of Switzerland’s 60% rule — that generally determines when a product may be described as Made in UK.
Where materials and components come from different countries, UK rules of origin instead look at whether sufficient working or processing has taken place here. Imported materials that have not been sufficiently worked or processed in the UK retain the origin of the country where that last qualifying processing took place.
There is also a registered Made in Britain trademark, but that is a voluntary mark licensed by a membership organisation, not a government designation. Its current eligibility criteria require raw materials or components to undergo a substantial and transformative change through manufacturing in Great Britain or Northern Ireland, with the labour making the finished marked product also based there.
So the law can establish an origin, and consumer law can challenge a claim that misleads.
But neither gives me the complete history of the object.
The law needs a line.
A maker can choose to go further.
So the Touring Cap will carry a different kind of record.
Not another statement about transparency, but six fixed fields that PIAFEIRA can be held to:
Cloth — what it is, where woven.
Materials — leather and other materials, and from where.
Components — who made them, where.
Maker — the named person or workshop.
Where the work was actually done — the premises, not simply the brand.
Assembly and finishing — where, by whom.
The same fields will follow every PIAFEIRA product and, where appropriate, the objects we document in the archive.
Where we know the answer, we record it.
Where we don’t, the blank remains visible.
Not knowing seems preferable to inventing a cleaner story.
Which brings me back to the Cobra.
Ian didn’t need a badge to make the car something it wasn’t. Thirty years later, its complicated provenance doesn’t diminish it.
It is the story.
I would like the Touring Cap to be made in Britain. But MADE IN UK cannot become more important than making the best object possible.
If the cloth comes from somewhere else, record where it was woven. If the leather is British, record it. If a component comes from Italy, Portugal, China or somewhere else, record that too.
That isn’t a weakness in the provenance.
That is the provenance.
And if one day the PIAFEIRA Touring Cap legitimately qualifies to carry MADE IN UK, I will be proud to use those words.
MADE IN UK may eventually be one of the answers.
It shouldn’t have to stand in for all the others.
