Warsaw women maintain their well-dressed image

Press, 1 February 1983, Page 14

Warsaw women maintain their well-dressed image

David Storey, NZPA-Reuter, reports from Warsaw on the ingenuity of Poles determined to subvert rationing of clothes.

The sign in the clothes shop at 26 Buczka Street in the Polish city of Lublin reads: “We serve the dead.” It is a sign of the economic crisis and of the depth of devoutness of the Catholic Polish people, for this queuefree shop. serves only garments for the deceased. This and similar shops in other major cities have just one function — to allow the relatives of dead people to ensure they are buried in a state of sartorial elegance even if the economic crisis did not allow them to live that way. In an interview with the weekly consumer magazine, “Veto,” Joanna Stepniak, who runs the shop with a special licence from the provincial authorities, said: “We carry a permanent stock for 100 dead people and always maintain this.” Anyone needing a smart outfit for a dead relative must bring the death certificate to the shop. But Mrs Stepniak admitted the sys-

tern could be open to abuse during the present severe shortage, when even shoes are rationed. For reasons she could not explain, the demand for clothes for dead men is 12 times that for women. In a five-week period at the end of last year her shop dressed 168 corpses. “We have suits, shirts, shoes, long and short underwear, socks. We even have handkerchiefs because you can’t get them easily in normal shops now. We don't have ties because there are no shortages," Mrs Stepniak said. “We have all the clothes to serve women, too — very nice dresses, brown, black, and beige shoes — even white ones. We have blouses, dresses, frocks, knickers, brassieres.” The Polish people have developed an almost infinite

capacity for skirting and outwitting bureaucratic regulations during the long periods of repression in their history, and this system appears not to be immune. Mrs Stepniak said apparently grieving sons often preferred to buy a light-coloured suit if they were available, “which is really not appropriate to the occasion.” She told of a woman who came into the shop after her 70-year-old grandmother died and insisted on trying on the dress herself before buying it. “People probably do abuse the system but we have no control over this,” she said. "There was a son. just over 20, who bought a. very smart suit, shoes, shirt and socks for his father. He insisted in underwear, too. saying his father, who left him

more than 20 hectares of land and two tractors, deserved it." she said. “I saw him leave and jump into a white Polonez (a Pol-ish-built car which is a luxury by local standards). What could I do? The law is the law .. She recalled that people had abused another system whereby a newly married couple could buy special things. “People forged marriage certificates on which they could buy unrationed vodka. 3 “With funerals it’s more serious. Death is something people should not exploit,” she said. Shortages of cotton, wool and other materials, much of which was imported from the West .before the present hard-currency crisis, have resulted in garments being hard to find. In the six months from

last October people are rationed to just one pair of shoes at State shops. For a high fee — sometimes well over the average monthly income of around 10.000 zloties ($160) — shoes are available in free markets. Some Poles say they have even tried to buy shoes at special shops for the disabled, where well-made left or right shoes are available which may be matched with later purchases from the same shop by someone else. Warsaw people, particularly women, strike a visitor who has read reports of economic deprivation as very well dressed, and the city has a reputation for elegance among Communist States. Fashionable but expensive private clothes shops abound, manyi. wom?JK hpve taken 10 making their' own garments in their cramped apartments and many still wear the trophies of trips to the West during the free-travelling 19705.