Speaking Part 2 最近買的一件衣服 Band 7+ 範答

Describe a piece of clothing you bought recently.

You should say:

• what it is
• where you bought it
• why you chose it
• and explain how you feel about it.

¹ A piece of clothing I bought fairly recently is a charcoal-grey wool overcoat that I picked up second-hand from a small vintage shop tucked down a side-street near Yongkang Street in Taipei, about five months ago. ² It's a slightly oversized 1990s Italian piece, knee-length, with horn buttons and a properly heavy lining — the kind of coat my father would have called "an investment".

³ I'd actually been looking for a winter coat for about two years without buying anything, mostly because the new ones I genuinely liked were all well over twenty thousand New Taiwan dollars. ⁴ I walked past this particular shop on a Saturday afternoon entirely by accident, spotted the coat on a rail through the window, and went in mainly out of curiosity.

⁵ What made me eventually choose it was a combination of three things. ⁶ Firstly, the wool was noticeably denser than anything I'd been able to find on the high street; secondly, the cut was unusually generous across the shoulders, which suits my build; and thirdly, the price tag, at four thousand five hundred, was about a fifth of what an equivalent new coat would have cost.

⁷ I still hesitated, though. ⁸ I tried it on three separate times over the course of two weeks before I finally bought it, partly because I'd never spent more than a thousand on any single item of clothing before and partly because I felt vaguely guilty about it.

⁹ Now that I've worn it through one full Taipei winter, the guilt has completely worn off. ¹⁰ It's the warmest, best-fitting thing I own, and there's something quietly satisfying about wearing a coat that's already had one full life before me.

A piece of clothing — well, footwear — I bought a couple of months ago is a pair of bright orange running shoes. I picked them up at a sports outlet in the Xinyi district during their end-of-season sale, and they were actually a slightly impulsive purchase.

Something I bought fairly recently that's already become my favourite item is a pair of selvedge denim jeans from a small Japanese brand. I ordered them online during a long weekend back in March, after about six months of half-heartedly window-shopping for a replacement pair.

A piece of clothing I bought just before last month's wedding season was a pale-blue linen shirt from a department store in central Taipei. I'd been quietly avoiding shopping for formal clothing for years, and this was the first proper shirt I'd bought since university.