Different lives and fashion

 

Greetings, my friends!

I would like to tell you about my observations. I enjoy watching Italian documentaries. Through these films I study the ordinary life of ordinary Italians during the last 100 years. And of course, I compare their lives with the corresponding period of life of ordinary Soviet people in the USSR and later in Russia.

Two different countries, which are thousands of kilometers away from each other, knowing almost nothing about each other. Only famous Soviet actors, diplomats, and military officers went abroad and saw what life was like abroad.

And now I look at old documentaries about Italy from before the war and I am simply amazed at how, for example, Italian village women and Russian village women dressed alike. It's an amazing feeling, almost a snapshot from life in pre-war Russia - everything is almost identical: long shapeless skirts, shirts that you can't tell if they're women's or men's, headscarves on their heads. They work in the fields, cutting hay, making stacks, and the women sometimes have their skirts equally pulled up so as not to interfere with their work.
After they work in the fields, they also sit on the cart and sing songs similar in motifs to Russian songs: long, searing, about a woman's hard life.

I sometimes shudder to think how identical we were.
I even tell my husband about it, how could it be that women in distant Russia practically did not differ from Italian women in pre-war times?

And here I can explain it by the fact, in my opinion, that we were practically in the same economic conditions. Russia and Italy before the 2nd World War were both agrarian countries, most of the people lived in the villages and were engaged in agriculture and cattle breeding. 

It's only after the 2nd World War that you feel a big difference between women. Italy comes to the level of a trendsetter and dictates to the world its views on fashion. It dresses and spoils women, makes them beauties and princesses, in the literal sense of the word.

Russian women are deprived of the opportunity to dress beautifully, because in Russia after the war it was necessary to strengthen the borders and build a system of national security, and not at all in the production of clothes. Industrial enterprises produced mass consumer goods and only a few dressed nicely.

Nowadays, the boundaries between the appearance of Italian and Russian women have practically been erased. I can say that young Russian girls are more concerned with their appearance: they wear their hair and makeup every day, they wear their clothes with a spike, they wear high heels in the morning.

Italian girls prefer a casual, comfortable style and do not wear heeled shoes unless necessary. And here, in my opinion, the reason is the feminism 
European women, they're independent, they're free, they don't want men to like them. They are self-sufficient. And of course we must recognize that Italian women have very good taste in clothes, they know how to combine colors, they may be able to pick up inexpensive clothes, but they will look expensive!

I see how my Italian friend dresses. All things are bought at the market, but she is always dressed expensively. To any set she has a bag to match, shoes to match and she does not wear the same shoes all the time. And she thinks so, that should always buy inexpensive, wear 2-3 times, and then take things to the committee and sell for the money they bought! 

I have shared with you only part of my observations and reasoning.

What do you think?