Vienna used to have the classic end-of-summer and end-of-winter sales, the kind of event my grandmothers would have recognized. No fast fashion. No really cheap shops. People bought a few well-made things and wore them for years or made such clothes themselves — or had them made.
Those who could afford to do it bought these well-made and not-cheap items before the sales. The rest of us waited and then competed with each other to snag the items of our dreams. (I remember one time when I ran up the down escalator to get in ahead of the very long line at a well-known establishment on Mariahilfer Straße. I was younger, more agile, and less principled in those days.)
This weekend I am re-reading Madeleine St. John’s “The Women in Black” about the saleswomen in Ladies’ Cocktail and Model Gowns respectively and the Christmas season at Goode’s, a fictional department store in Sydney in the late 1950s. (The film, which I saw on Netflix, strays a bit but is still enjoyable. I devoured Julia Ormond’s portrayal of Magda, the Slovene “reffo” or refugee.)
I have just gotten to the chapter on the post-holiday sales and was flooded with memories, like the one above, of how it used to be in Vienna.
“The great doors opened and the phalanx of grim-faced viragos cantered through the breach and down the marble steps; it took a good five minutes for the whole formation to pass him as the Ruritanian lieutenant-colonel [doorman], standing well clear, reviewed it … the scene at Goode’s for the next ten days would be, not to put too fine a point on it, a battlefield; honors would be won, and, indeed, merited; trophies would be displayed; lives might not be lost but wounds of one kind or another would most certainly be sustained; the sale was now in progress.”
(Actually, that bit about wounds being sustained makes me think even more of Filene’s Basement in the good old days of bargain-hunting in Boston, also no longer as it was. Nonetheless. )
Suddenly, from a different era and an entirely different context a line came to me. A former student of mine, now a colleague, published a book called “Friction” a few months ago. It’s about how convenience removes friction in our lives, which is, of course, the whole idea, and what it costs us, individually and societally, in terms of health and personal development to have that friction removed. My biggest takeaway from “Friction” so far is “Needs met by default [never hungry, never too hot or too cold] blunt the gratitude that came with meeting them.”
Apparently, those good old sales were good for gratitude — and character building.
Just a quick note to go back to “The Women in Black”. Hilary Mantel’s comment about it was, “The book I most often give as a gift to cheer people up.” And it’s easy to see why.
