Ropa!

One day when Andrea and I were on a bus together, I asked her about the clothing that the indigenous people wear. We were in Peru but I knew it was the same idea in Mexico, where she's from. I felt silly asking but I just wasn't sure if they wore the clothes because they wanted to or because they felt like they had to.

She named a number of reasons that they dress how they do. It's traditional for them and they're proud of their traditions as well as very accustomed to them. Their clothes are practical for their daily activities and for the weather. They like the way the dress and wouldn't want to change it. She also added that they probably think the way we dress is very strange...to them it's surely not as practical or as beautiful.

The conversation reminded me of a picture that we discussed in one of my classes once:


It's hard to understand why someone dresses so differently from you but it's all completely culture-related. Surely if I were growing up in an indigenous area of Peru, I would dress like them. If I grew up in Saudi Arabia, I would probably dress more like the woman in the picture above. This list could go on for hours but I grew up in small town Ohio and that's why I dress the way I do.

The differences aren't always this extreme, though. No matter where you go, styles and limits are different. In Korea, I wasn't allowed to dress like the woman on the left (I was forbidden to do so just outside my own house and it's not really even all that acceptable at the beach, either). It's not really okay for shoulders to show in Korea (I'll never forget the times I was yelled at for wearing a tank top while running) but their acceptable length of shorts is, for American standards, practically up their asses. Here in Brazil, the bathing suits they wear would be totally unacceptable in most places in the U.S. Again, I could go on and on with a list like this because everywhere is different and people will forever feel the most comfortable with what they learned from their culture while growing up. Anything too different just feels wrong. Too slutty or too covered up; whatever the case it just doesn't feel right.

It's funny how offended and/or terrified people get by the way other people dress. It's just another one of the millions of things that we think separate us from one another, even though we're all the same.