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Beauty at the Conference

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Middle-aged German women dress with excellent taste and femininity. I’ve actually written down a couple of outfits that I want to imitate. Striking good taste and exceptional elegance.

There are also many Italians at the conference, and Italian women don’t make an effort to look nice. They are so beautiful, with such striking facial features and fantastic figures, that they feel they don’t need to. How do they maintain these figures well into their sixties? Don’t they eat pasta?

Of particular loveliness at the conference is an academic couple composed of an Italian man and a Spanish woman who have traveled with their troop of small children and take turns chaperoning them around campus. These are clearly conservative scholars who are living in accordance with their beliefs.

4 responses to “Beauty at the Conference”

  1. cliff arroyo Avatar
    cliff arroyo

    “Middle-aged German women dress with excellent taste”

    My national stereotypes about dress are mostly from vacations in tourist areas. I remember once on Fuerteventura losing the will to live after seeing lots and lots and lots of middle-aged British women wearing clothes that were two sizes to small and about three times too revealing. Then what I assume was a middle aged German woman walked by with a simple short sleeved shirt and denim skirt (nothing too revealing and very well fitted) and she looked better than women decades her junior.

    IME Italians are the best dressed on vacations (maybe academic conferences are a different story) with Spanish and French more or less tied for second. Brits are the worst with Germans sort of inbetween – generally inoffensive but occasionally wildly inappropriate.

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    1. Clarissa Avatar
      Clarissa

      British people do have a weird sense of style, it’s true.

      Ukrainian women my age are chronically overdressed, and I’m no exception. But young Ukrainian women dress horribly. They have adopted what they perceive as the progressive American style, and it’s grim. I think they are surprised when they actually come to America and see that reality is much prettier than they imagined. One of my Ukrainian GAs was given a pretty dress by an American friend and dressy shoes by me, and once we managed to persuade her to wear them, she became a beauty instead of the mousy creature she normally enacts.

      The generational difference is so visible it’s actually funny when I appear in public with my Ukrainian GAs. People have asked, “are you both from Ukraine??” because we look like we are from different planets.

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      1. cliff arroyo Avatar
        cliff arroyo

        “young Ukrainian women dress horribly”

        It occurs to me that I no longer have any idea how American university students dress. I know how Polish students dress though and the students from Belarus/Ukraine I’ve had don’t really stand out from the general norm…

        This is pretty typical for warmer weather (add in a few in goth or anime inspired outfits for a fuller picture)

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        1. Clarissa Avatar
          Clarissa

          I like seeing pictures directly in a comment. It almost never happens.

          If you take this picture and imagine that these young people are visited by country bumpkin cousins living in poverty and with outdoor toilets, you’ll know what these Ukrainian outfits look like.

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A conservative literary critic and college professor

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