There's never a better view of yourself than from a stranger.

In the university of Tomsk, I used to study with a different group before transferring. During the Language Practice classes we had a British exchange student, Rosie, to come to us and talk about various topics. Once, we were discussing fashion and clothing traditions of two countries, and Rosie said, as in the title of the post, "People here dress really smart".

It's true, and it was true before she mentioned it, but I only came to notice it after she put it that way. In the modern Russia - a place of more prosperity than the Soviet Russia ever was - people find it important to dress "properly": stylishly, often fashionably. For young adult women, decorative scarves are common, as are medium and high heels. They wear it daily, which means that for special occasions they have to dress even more brightly - and they manage that, too. For men of the same age range, It isn't uncommon to see an impeccably dressed one - a black coat with a proper suit underneath and a pair of slick shoes - going around in universities and offices.

Among both genders, simpler, freer, sportish styles are as common - sometimes mixing with more officially-looking clothes to form a semi-casual style, but that's not what caught Rosie's eye. For her and many of her peers here in Tomsk - there are six of them this year - it's the high style that was peculiar, as - no offence - they themselves don't dress well. I can see their point - what they wear is much more comfortable, and it does the job the clothes are supposed to do - but having grown in an environment of valued appearance, I don't understand, on the basic level, why do they do that.

Not that I have anything against such simpler tradition of clothing. It's important for me to notice this because, despite what I thought I believed in, appearance, it turned out, mattered a lot both to me personally and to the society I live in - something I missed completely though all those years.

Then I noticed something else. Many of the same people who dress with various levels of "sharply" - or, "smart", as Rosie put it - also carry around smartphones: the bigger the screen and the brighter the brand name, the better. Many of us build their appearance around the same pillars, even though we don't even notice it: materialism and care for what others think of us. My parents care very much of what others might think if they do something "weird", and I came to imbibe this to an extent, though as the time goes I recognize how silly such behavior is.

I just had a conversation with a former groupmate of mine - from the group Rosie talks with to this day - about this very subject and came to interesting ideas as to what might have caused this attitude, as well as the extent of the subject. What seems right to me is this: Britain was always a prosperous country. British of the middle class grow up knowing full well that they'd always have everything they need because their country's position in the world is high and firm - therefore, they don't have to worry about not having enough.

On the contrary, modern Russia is a progeny of the Soviet Union, a place of near-poverty where most people never had nearly as prosperous a living, and after the Iron Curtain fell, people came across vast stocks of good clothes, of good furniture, of good other categories of items. Still, deep inside the Russians sits the fear of not having enough and/or of losing what they have, and those who grew up in the Soviet Union Russia imposed this fear, unconsciously - just as they've experienced it - over their children - i.e., us and those of younger generations. We - the children generations - thus, still fear losing stuff, even though there seems to be nothing to predict this happening any time soon.

Rosie is around my age - she's 20, and I'm officially 21 today - while my groupmates - of both groups - are 17 to 18. We've experienced the world for around the same amount of time, but Rosie lived in very different circumstances from us. In the Soviet Union, people measured each other by the way they dress and the richness they lived in, because in this country there wasn't much else a measure of a person. It's a crappy way to live, but Soviet Russians - and any other Soviet nationality, though I only speak for the group I'm familiar with - had no other way. With time, it became the way, and even after the Union fell, people were still looking at the world through the same lens. Hence, the materialism; hence, the care for other's approval.

P.S. This was one of the most interesting topics I've yet went through in the #russiabynatives series. Such questions are what I enjoy exploring, as they offer an intellectual challenge as well as a rich reward of understanding human beings and human cultures better.