My place of employment while in the Czech Republic is an atelier whose name is the French equivalent of "The Bohemian" which sells handmade clothes. It's mostly aimed at older well-heeled "ladies of fashion", and most of the customers are women with an interest in handmade and suchlike. My task consists of doing everything that doesn't take skill (ie everything except the sewing of the clothes). So I mostly talk with customers, act much more bubbly and cheery than my normal cynical self would, catalog the clothes, do shop finances, dress up the mannequins, etc. For having only been there three days, I have rather a large amount of responsibility. The store owner routinely leaves me there to man the store by myself, and after the second day, I was told to lock up the store for the night, basically putting me in charge of the security of thousands of dollars worth of clothing and shop materials. This was rather daunting, but I managed ok, and only got slightly told off for leaving the potted plant outside where someone could have stolen it. Why someone would steal a giant potted mass of leaves I'm not really sure, but duly noted.
Anyhow, photographic evidence of my hard work:
It's an incredibly pleasant workspace, filled with various colorful objects and such and a very nice, non-corporate atmosphere.
We have a chandelier. I spend large mounts of time staring at it when I have nothing better to do, which is often, because customers are scant.
A dressmaker's dummy, painstakingly dressed by me. Have you ever tried to dress a dressmaker's dummy? To me it's an incredibly awkward experience. It's like a dead person going through rigor mortis, and I constantly feel as though I'm feeling it up or intruding on its privacy.
I have no idea what this is. It could be one of those avant-garde headpieces for Prada which make the model look as though she has a donut on her head (which she in fact does), a kinky pair of handcuffs, or something else. I have affectionately dubbed it the UFO (unidentified fashionable object) and continue to wonder why it sells for the equivalent of 61 dollars.
