028-Wearing your bank account

028-Wearing your bank account, originally uploaded by gingerpig2000.

Ania is currently attending a slimming club, which partly involves sitting on a fitness bike for an hour several times a week, along with a number of other people. What is interesting is that many of these people are more financially well off than we are, and they are boasting that they will soon be able to get clothes out of the attic that they have not worn in over a decade, since the last time that they fitted.

Proud of keeping clothes for a decade? How many clothes were they buying that so much did not get worn enough that they were worth storing? How good would one look in fashion a decade old? Is this really a bonus? Ania and I regularly get rid of clothes as they become worn, buying enough to wear and not too many that we cannot dispose of them to charity at a suitable stage of wear. Our parents and grandparents kept clothes for much longer, but pride in storage?

One might drag in that over used excuse here in Poland, and blame it on the shortages of the 1980s, but that was twenty years ago and we are talking about educated people, often very well educated people. Where did the programming in their heads come from, what is keeping it going?

Interestingly enough, these same people say that when they cook for their family they have to have something of everything. But these people are on a diet and proud of their ability to keep things for a decade in a wardrobe in their attic, how can you be proud of not wearing clothes that don't fit and wasting wardrobe room when you cannot do the task that is before you - stay on a diet. What about being proud of not eating what you should not be eating?

Here in Poland there is a lot of very expensive, rubbish quality, designer label clothing - which you can purchase from what the local middle classes believe are exclusive boutiques. You have a job which pays well - forget any stories about Poles being poor, by the way, the middle classes are rolling in cash, propery and cars - and so you spend a significant portion on clothes which only look good to other locals, buy more and then store the excess in a wardrobe. Poland, like anywhere, has a lot of good design talent, little of which seems to leak out into the stores, but the middle classes lap it up and then strut around like they were something special. do you remember the story of the king's new clothes, this is a bit like that, where people are duped into parting for cash for no quality.

The oohs, the aahs, when one of them arrives in a shawl, mocassin style shoes, black concealer trousers and bum-covering jecket or coat and a hairstyle that grandma had back in the 1940s, cut to the length that has been deemed suitable for one's age.

When women are young, they cut their hair short to make them look older and more worldly, and buy clothes for work more typical of a forty-year-old who has lost whatever grip they once had on style. The clothing is often cheap, replicas of the mature styles. Later, asa they grow older, they can buy more expensive versions, and they wear them more often, until eventually they wear them most of the time, desperately hanging onto something that they never really had. Men are not immune, the suit eventually producing someone who believes that shorts and short-sleeved shirts are acceptable beachwear.

Style, on the other hand, is something that has to be worked at, but once you allow other things to dominate in your life, the confidence for style just all too easily slips away. Ania has been working hard over the past couple of years to learn confidence in style, and as a consequence is breaking free of the clothing tradition. the clothes she wears do not cost much, and the greatest variation she has is with the smallest items - having more scarves than coats takes less room and less money than the oh so common more coats than scarves we see so often.

Any fool can spend their money on clothes, buying fashion and fashionable cuts and colours, while spending the right money on clothes that suit one's figure, colouring and needs takes nothing but the commitment to continue making conscious decisions throughout one's life.