Sunday, August 22, 2004

Single-sex sample sales?

Yesterday I went to the Barney's Warehouse Sale, which is a wonderful moment in the lives of those who are addicted not necessarily to books but to some of the most beautiful shoes, clothes, and did I mention shoes, in the land. The thing is with these sorts of sales, women (and, in some cases and elsewhere at this particular sale, men) strip down to just about nothing right smack in the middle of the place, not in any sort of dressing room since none exist, so as to make sure their bargain designer finds actually fit. As a small child first being introduced to this world by my mother, I was a bit unnerved, but I've long since trained myself to just try the stuff on, knowing full well that everyone else, presumably lesbians included but I can't say for sure, is there mostly for the great deals, not for the nude women.

Now, sometimes men infiltrate the part of the room that's functioning as a dressing room. These men fall into the following categories:

1) Gay or gay-seeming men who wear women's clothing. I have absolutely no problem with such men joining my fellow women and me in digging through bins of last season's Marc Jacobs.

2) Husbands, boyfriends, and friends of the women trying stuff on. These men should just plain not be there. Sometimes they're just there to leer at the other women, sometimes not, but in either case they take up much-needed space. The sale was very, very crowded yesterday, and I did not want to be any closer than I had to be to the interesting-smelling, hairy-pitted woman next to me.

3) Unaccompanied heteros: OK, they need to go. It's not even that they're creepy--which they are of course--but that they take up space without even providing any much-needed advice about whether the various outfits the women are trying on look good or not. They don't even notice the outfits.

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