Social benefits of distinguishing clothing

I've discovered the social benefits of distinguishing clothing twice
the last week:

I've bought rollerskiis for use during a temporary job in northern
Germany and that's apparently a very unusual sight here, because both
when I put them on before and when I took them off after my first
training, people asked what I was wearing, if it was some kind of
skiing training and so on.

More planned was my use of a brand new hat with a Swedish flag in the
forehead when skiing Marcialonga last weekend. It lead to discussions
with people from Norway, Sweden, Finland and a guy from the Netherland
who knew happened to know Norwegian (Norwegian and Swedish are very
similar languages, well, more like two accents of one language). :-)

/ Niklas G