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DPA
Birgit Kaiser fingers the shiny pullover carefully, checking out first the material and then the neckline.
“Low-cut necklines don’t suit me,” says the 39-year-old.
But the jumper her friend Gabriele Weck has picked out for her has a high neckline and therefore it makes the shortlist.
She’s been blind in her right eye since childhood. Until a few years ago she was able to recognize strong colours like red with her left eye.
“But now I can only see contrasts like light and dark, I can recognize a light. Candles get difficult,” she explains. She remembers some colours from childhood but these memories are fading with time.
“Colours become academic at some point,” she says. New shades like “nude” or “taupe,” which they didn’t have in communist East Germany where she grew up – they just had the all-encompassing “beige” – mean nothing to her. It’s Annett Krones’ mission to help the blind and visually impaired dress themselves how they want.
She owns a small boutique in the town of Aue, eastern Germany, which offers fashion and colour advice to the blind in cooperation with the local association of the visually impaired.
“The biggest obstacle for me was the question of how I explain fashion to women who perceive the world quite differently to me,” she says.
The 54-year-old is not visually impaired herself and so at first found it difficult to imagine whether colour was important to the blind, and if so what role it played.
That’s when she came upon the idea of using her second passion to help people like Kaiser: music.
Beethoven’s ninth symphony and its deep, minor tones indicate black; a fiery tango stands for red; a blues song by Aretha Franklin is green; and pink comes to life with Lou Bega’s hit “Mambo No 5.”
“The idea of using music to explain colours I think is very fitting, because even blind people associate something with colour, even though they can’t see,” says Kaiser.
The same applies to fashion. Just because they can’t see themselves in the mirror doesn’t mean they don’t want to look good and express their personalities through their clothing like everybody else.
“I want compliments from other people and I need that ego boost,” says Kaiser, who works as a registrar.
Weck likes clothes that not everybody else is wearing – the last time she was here she walked out with a pair of black trousers with leather applique. The 56-year-old isn’t blind, but her visual impairment is quite severe.
She can differentiate between two colours when they’re next to each other but dark colours all look the same to her. Her field of vision is also narrowing, becoming more and more tunnel-like.
Large shops where the clothing is often arranged by colour and the different sizes are all next to one another leave both women frustrated.
At Krones’ boutique on the other hand they find the one thing that the blind really need when they go clothes shopping: trust.
“Someone who tells me quite honestly what I can and can’t wear,” says Kaiser. For Krones, blind customers are also a business plan. An apparel shop in a small town can only survive against the growing competition of internet shopping if it offers unique personal service that you cannot get online.
