Elements of Clothing

I hardly get excited over clothes and I rarely shop for them except when necessary.  The last time I had gone out purposedly to buy clothes was last December.  My friend had to drag me out because it was already the weekend before I was to leave for Europe and I haven't bought any winter clothes yet.  Off we went, but not before we had lunch.  We went from one shop to another checking out sweaters and jackets and scarves and gloves.  My friend tried more clothes than I did.  And by the end of the shopping day, I had bought a scarf and a pair of gloves and he had bought three t-shirts.

You still have no jacket! He exclaimed.

So on the day before I left, instead of meeting up with my closest friends, I shopped.  The not-so-good thing about me shopping alone is that I don't go to department stores.  It's not an elitist preference, but department stores have so many options and so many racks to go through that they just give me headache and sore feet.  The fact is I loathe shopping so much, I consider it such a waste of time to sort through ten thousand t-shirts just to find one good shirt.  I much prefer going through fifty t-shirts where the hard part is deciding which one of them is best when they all look so good.  I like having my choices winnowed down for me already.  It saves a lot of time, which for me is priceless and better spent on other things like sleeping.

Given that I only had two hours to spare before I had to start packing, my safest bet of buying winter clothes was at Zara.  I bought a winter jacket and a coat and spent the next four months paying for my credit card bill.  My friends were telling me how it was so not worth buying them since I would only get two weeks of extensive use for them and then they'd be placed in the closet until I go to some wintry country again.  But I decide what's worth the price.  They saved me time from going around and the article, the materials used felt good on me.

There was another time, a much earlier time, when after being done with gym I was lolling around the mall because I did not want to go home yet.  I checked out one shop, out of curiousity because it was new and saw a Zegna shirt.  They looked and felt so good, it was so tempting to buy.  The price tag however stopped me for a bit and a thousand voices rushed inside my head; mostly I imagine my friends shouting at me that at 13,000 pesos I could buy a lot more clothes.  I didn't buy it.  I consider, after much deliberation, that it was too much for my lowly and low salary.

Yesterday, my heart skipped a beat.  It was the first time in awhile since I had gotten excited over something, more so on something that relates to clothes.  Bored while waiting for my Mom to finish trying out clothes, I saw a jacket, which I thought looked cool.  I checked out the label and it was a Zegna.  A Zegna Elements Jacket.  Gad, it just looked so good.  The best thing about it and the thing that I love about it is it adjusts its temperature automatically to suit weather conditions from an icy chill of -10 degrees to 20 degrees Celsius.  Talk about technology.  The price tag? $3450.00.  Excluding tax.  I entered the store with bored expectations and left with a heartbreak.

I sighed and remembered what my friend from Saudi has always told me.  Oh, you.  No matter what or where, you will always gravitate unconsciously to the most expensive items.  Even her mom had told me once that it will be hard for me to get married because no wife can ever stand a husband who buys expensive clothes without as much as a blink and then will go on an extended hunger strike because there's no more money in the bank.  But then I thought, who's getting married?  In my world, that almost never happen.