Please Don't Follow, Just Stand Your Ground
Do I differ from the rest of consumer society, or are those things a form of punishment?
I really don’t know — perhaps there is something in the way I look. It says: “I am a miserable, maladjusted soul, lost among randomly displayed arrays of clothing. Direct me to what I want or I will wander aimlessly until closing time and scare other customers away”. Anyway, it usually takes from thirty seconds to two minutes to the point of “Perhaps I could help you, lady?”
Please don’t.
1. It’s a known fact that one can ask an assistant for directions. I won’t hesitate to do that if I feel like it. I’m not as shy as I look.
2. Let’s suppose I am looking for a skirt. You will ask about the size and colour (if I’m lucky, that is, and you won’t ask me about the “sizie”, which is so very hip, eh?), I can even tell you that it should be tighter at the top and loose at the bottom and, say, black. But if you were to really help me find something I like I’d have to spend a quarter of an hour providing you with other information — the blouse/shirt/whatever that is supposed to go with it, the fabrics/patterns I like/dislike, the cut types, the colours, the collar, the cuff, the sleeve, the folds, the pockets… Oh, for sense’s sake. Just don’t distract me. Go away. Bugger off.
Or perhaps next time this is what I will do: give you a twenty-minute-long story on the development of my fashion tastes and unspecified attitudes towards specific cut/colour/pattern arrangements. Perhaps you deserve it for all those moments when trying the pieces on I hear from behind the curtain “So, how’s that skirtie?”
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