Are You Thin Enough or Fashionable Enough for a Boutique?

 

The Jennifer purse by Tom Ford at Neiman Marcus, the $38,100 Swiss is croc leather.

I don’t know exactly what happened to Oprah Winfrey in the Swiss high-end boutique that allegedly refused to let her look at a $38,100 purse because it was expensive and she could not afford it. The saga turned into an accusation of racism from Oprah’s perspective, and a “she said, we said” from the shop owner’s side.

I do know, based on my frequent travels that most Europeans do not engage in acts of racism; they are elitist socialists embracing multiculturalism to the point of self-destruction.

EU has opened its borders to people from 27 different countries and to a massive exodus from North Africa and the Middle East. They have opened the floodgates of socialist welfare and nationalized medicine to anybody who set foot in Europe, no questions asked, allowing them to set up ghettoes of the countries they’ve fled.

Elitist Europeans do consider themselves superior educationally to Americans and see us as tennis shoe wearing loud idiots who do not understand the fashionable refinement of squeezing our feet in shoes that were only meant for torture and of starving ourselves because food is too expensive to consume. Europeans consider fatness a sign of stupidity and laziness.

The French, dressed in their Sunday best, sip wine and smoke at street side cafes, watching sneaker wearing American tourists with contempt, jealous that they cannot afford to be tourists in America as frequently as Americans are tourists in France.

Most boutiques, including high-end ones, allow customers in by appointment only or are buzzed in if they are thin enough and fashionably dressed enough. Anybody size 8 or larger cannot find clothes in their shops anyway and are considered fat.

I saw a shop in northern Italy dedicated to large women called “La Grassa” (The Fat). It was remarkably crass since most northern Italian women were petite, size 0-4, and looked like they’ve been poured into their black pants, walking fast in stilettoes among cobbled stones.

There is a certain look that a customer in an expensive shop must have, gaunt, skeletal, pale, and dressed in the most expensive clothes money can buy or deliberate rags if he/she is a celebrity. Shopkeepers are paid in commission and they know how to profile and pamper a prospective buyer.

Boutiques often do not allow shoppers to try on clothes since they are afraid the items might be soiled by a person’s body odor. Likewise, touching a very expensive purse would be out of the question for most customers, to protect it from damage.  Race does not play a role. Owners know how to appease and please even the most spoiled and demanding among the very rich.

Europeans are very protective of their personal possessions. For example, Germans would be offended and shocked if a person would ask to borrow their clothes or jewelry to wear for a special occasion. That is a cultural faux pas.

Shop owners and their employees are generally not very patient, courteous, and polite as many sales associates are in the U.S. They do not allow customers ample time to choose items for a purchase. They will often walk away if an American takes more than a few minutes to decide if they will buy something or not.

Furthermore, sales people assume Americans do not speak the language of that country, and make unkind judgmental comments about customers, brazenly in front of them, to nearby colleagues. They do it because they think Americans ignorant and monolingual. I have questioned crude remarks before, if I happened to speak that language, to let them know that it was inappropriate to take advantage of someone who may or may not understand.

European mass consumerism has never risen to the level that it has in the U.S. Sales happen only two times a year in a country like Germany and are highly regulated by the government. They do not want shops offering a sale to have an unfair competition over other shops that do not.

I cannot remember how many times my mother and I were profiled in shops in this country in the 80s when there were few foreigners in the town where we lived. We were followed closely as if we were criminals ready to pounce on their merchandise, while natives were actually stealing from them. One small shop owner actually told us to leave because he did not want our business. It was his business, it was his choice, and I never thought him to be racist or discriminatory in any way. There were plenty other places where we could spend our money.

Abercrombie and Fitch profiles, they want their clothes on “skinny people who are sexy.” They don’t make larger sizes because they don’t want their clothes on fat people. It is their choice. http://fox4kc.com/2013/05/10/abercrombie-fitch-fat-ugly-people-shouldnt-buy-our-clothes/

Clubs of all sorts profile. They have the right to choose who they admit to their membership roster. HOAs profile and choose and pick who they allow to purchase an apartment in their co-ops, even among the very rich. There is a certain pedigree required.

To see profiling in action, walk into a high-end department store in this country, and you will experience the same treatment. And it has nothing to do with race. The women are paid salaries and commissions and have learned to profile your body size, the clothes you wear, the purse you carry, the shoes, the hair cut, the makeup, the jewelry, and, based on such profiling, you may find yourself totally ignored, looked at with contempt, or you may be lavished with fawning attention.

Profiling

When Americans complain about profiling, I am reminded of living under the watchful eye of the ever-vigilant police in Romania. There were three branches, the Militia, ordinary traffic and disputes police, the Securitate, the spying police, and Militia Economica, or the economic police. There was not a clear delineation between duties since any citizen could be picked up by any of the above and interrogated for no particular reason and held against their will without due process for days and weeks. Their families never knew where they were. We lived in fear of police, they were not there to protect and serve us, but to harass and imprison us. We were guilty until proven innocent and, most times, we were just plain guilty without the benefit of due process.

I was surprised that Americans object so vehemently to illegals being I.D.ed after crimes were committed. Do we not need to know who the criminals are? Every innocent American has to show I.D.s in order to prove who they are at the DMV, at driving checkpoints, at the doctor's office, in hospitals, at airports, at the court house, at department stores, at border crossings, etc. You can no longer pay with credit cards without showing you are who your credit card says you are. Credit card fraud has spawned such checks. You cannot enter any building with a certain level of security without showing I.D. and passing through scanners.

We feared police constantly in Romania. Many citizens were detained for their views under lock and key at their place of employment or at home if an important politician was passing by. Their lack of membership in the communist party was seen as an enemy of the state and thus of the official who happened to be in the vicinity. People were rounded up on election day and forced to go vote for the only communist candidate on the ballot. We were stopped because we might have given the policeman a furtive look, a sideways look, perhaps we carried bags that appeared too laden with merchandise, where did you get the money, where did we buy the loot, was it stolen, did we have proof that we purchased that? Maybe we were in the wrong place at the right time, or the right place at the wrong time. Each citizen had to carry an I.D. at all times that resembled a passport. This I.D. had your picture, address, blood type, where you lived, communist party affiliation sector, union affiliation block, how many times you have moved, stamps fromt the police showing that you have registered your new address as soon as you moved in, or, if you didn't, which neighbor ratted you out and what fine you had to pay for non-compliance with the law. Not that Romanians dared to move that much. You were pretty much stuck where you were born and raised, job or school mobility were discouraged. Every citizen received this I.D.upon turning 14 years old. This was considered the age of emancipation and thus legal responsibility. The law judged people not on the basis of precedent but on the basis of the law as it was written by the communist government. This law changed at whim to suit their platform, views, and ideology. Which brings me to the story of Caroline. I changed her name to protect the innocent. Caroline was my best friend in high school and my freshman and sophmore years in college. We were very close, rode the train together to school for two years, and interned in the summer at the Black Sea. The summer between our freshman and sophmore year in college, we were interns with the port of Constanta, verifying cargo and serving as translators. The port captain often told us to go to the beach and have fun when there were no ships coming in. One such fateful day, my friend decided to go on a date with a Swabian friend from Transylvania, I will call him Hans. She forgot her I.D. home while her date had his German passport. The I.D. check happened around 9 p.m. There was no curfew in place for young people under 21 or anybody else after 9 p.m., but people were discouraged from wandering or loitering the streets at night. The two were strolling, having fun, talking, like any teenagers would do. Except my friend was taken downtown to the Securitate in the basement and interrogated for hours. And that was not all. Because her date was German speaking Schwaben (his Romanian was limited as it is often the case with people of Germanic origin from Transylvania), he was assumed to be a foreigner, was let go, while they grilled her over illicit relations with foreigners (which was against the law). Any contact with a foreign national was forbidden by law. To teach her a lesson, the five officers of the law decided to take turns raping her. She returned home in the morning, in shock. We took her to the hospital, there was no inquiry, no law suit, no punishment because it was the law, the government representatives who raped her. Who was going to give her justice? A totalitarian government?

We remained friends, although I moved to the U.S. in 1978, and corresponded with Caroline for years. After e-mail became more prevalent, we wrote for a while and then lost touch. I don't know what happened to her, I know she married Hans, had two children, but I don't know her whereabouts. Last time I physically saw her was in Germany in 1994 - she drove for hours with her family to meet me for a brief reunion in Regensburg. She seemed normal and happy but Hans begged to differ. She was mentally unstable in the last two years before we lost contact. Her e-mails were erratic and bizarre at times. I don't think she ever received proper mental treatment from her ordeal and never recovered from the trauma she suffered. There was no closure to her rape - nobody was brought to justice for their crime.