Fillets were long, ritualized textile bands most familiar to Classicists in the form of victory ribbons conferred as prizes in poetic, athletic, and martial contests. Artistic renderings of the bands in more permanent forms of visual art, such as in victor statues like Polykleitos’ Diadoumenos, memorialized this symbolic capital of adornment with which Greeks distinguished the human beings, animals, and images representing the best in their class. To fillet, and to be filleted in turn, were competitive gestures residing at the heart of the circulation of honors undergirding the Greek agonistic economy of excellence. The fillet’s exercises in comparison thus made merit visible and knowable to beholders of sacred images that canonized their subjects’ accolades. By attending to formal developments in sculpture between the Archaic and Classical periods, in which the representation of the fillet acquires greater visual prominence in the rendering of the human figure, this talk addresses what we might call the “art of deservedness” during a critical transition moment in Greek contest culture. Since ancient authors regularly question the winner’s talent and the partiality of judges, victory ribbons also expose the politics of ornamentation, as well as the myths and other fictions operative in this uniquely Greek mechanism of producing and measuring relative and absolute value. By attending to which agents earned the privilege of wearing the bands and during which ritualized transactions, we can discern those abstract concepts for which the Greeks were willing to compete at all costs. Fillets demonstrate that social economies of value were indeed artistic matters, motivated by narratives of achievement and defeat then circulating on view within the community.