30 minutes later, Hogsmeade
After getting off the carriage from Hogwarts at Hogsmeade Parvati went to Tomes and Scrolls to see if they still had that book on floriography, which they did, and reserving it to pick up later. Next she visited the florist’s to find out how much it would cost to arrange for them to discreetly deliver some Arborvitae tomorrow, which led to the revelation that Arborvitae are conifers, and as such the florist didn’t normally keep them stocked but he would be able to arrange for their delivery for a not unreasonable, if high, fee.
Gladrags was next. On her last trip she had only been interested in robes and so hadn’t paid attention to anything else and apart from robes and Hogwarts uniforms the situation was truly dire. If anything the Magical World seemed to be even further behind in fashion, apart from robes, than anywhere else. Other than robes and Hogwarts uniforms there wasn’t that much to choose from either, dresses for girls and some underwear and that was it as far as she could see. And she didn’t know which was worse. The dresses were the sort that seemed to show up in old paintings that couldn’t be accurate. A corset with a floor length skirt and sleeves attached, some with rather large collars. Thankfully none of them had any ruffles at all and none of them looked like they had balloons hidden inside them like some of the paintings showed. And the selection of styles and colours was very limited. Checking the clothes revealed, as Parvati expected, that they lacked tags and likely sizes, meaning that if she guessed Hermione’s size wrong it likely wouldn’t matter as the dresses would be designed for a larger range of women.
If she brought them, they were really gowns and way too fancy for either Harry’s date with Hermione tomorrow which was really a dinner between friends or his date with her and her sister tonight, which now that she thought about it, was really a first date.
The lowers in underwear were about what she had expected, but the bras, uuhh. It looked like that the Wizarding World had never heard of Alphabet Bras. And the limited selection of muggle manufacturer, likely in attempt to get sales from the muggleborn, was heavily slanted towards the larger sizes that no schoolgirl should ever need. With what she had talked about with Pad for non-school clothes for next year if everything went to plan this wouldn’t do, they weren’t right for day-to-day wear and didn’t show the girl wearing them off, she'd known that for the interesting and suggestive ideas they would have to buy from a muggle store before the year begun but it looked like they wouldn’t be able to get anything they wanted clothes wise next year from wizarding stores and you couldn’t owl order muggle stores.
These gave Parvati an idea, one that she hoped would make Hermione see her in a better light. Her father would be upset at first when he saw how much money she would be spending this month, but when he saw what she would be spending it on she thought he would be happier. Now, onto the jeweller’s.
When they had visited their father over the Christmas Holidays after hearing their plans he’d arranged for Nalini, their second mother and his concubine, to give them The Talk. The Talk had covered more then just it’s normal subject matter, it had also for some reason a slightly related part of their culture their parents correctly believed they hadn’t been introduced to before: Body Jewelry.
Parvati had thought she knew jewelry but she was wrong. The first thing Hoshma had shown and modeled for them had been rings and bracelets, each bracelet had two rings, worn on the index and ring fingers, attached to it by chains, they'd also been shown a version for ones feet. There was nothing like that in the store, all the rings were promise, engagement and wedding rings with a smattering of showpiece rings for rich people to show off how rich they were, nothing that was or could be connected to a bracelet of which they stocked none.
Parvati had been shocked when Hoshma had shown them the necklaces, heavy things with lots of jewels on the front part in slightly different lengths so that you could wear several of them at once and people could still tell them apart on your naked chest. The only ones the jeweler had in stock were dainty little things that would be hard to make out and were short enough to fit inside a decent collar. They reminded her of the waist-chain they had been shown, that while somewhat embarrassing, both Padma and she had resolved to get their own as soon as possible because they liked the way it highlighted a woman's hips like racy underwear without her having to wear any.
Worst of all were the earrings, if Parvati thought she had been embarrassed by the waist-chain it was nothing compared to how she felt when Hoshma was done talking about piercings. They had both been well aware that your ears could be pierced but the other locations were eye openers. They'd seen jewelry for belly buttons before, but the thought that such jewelry could be held in place by a piercing was new, just were that piercing was had been surprising as Hoshma had put it on, instead of going through the knot of flesh inside the belly button it went through the bit of skin at the top.
That had been the piercing that had shocked them the least. Both their mother and Hoshma had had their nipples pierced when they knew they wouldn’t be having any more children and therefore wouldn’t be breast feeding again (Their mother sometime after they were born and Hoshma a couple of years ago). The revelation of those piercings however paled however beside Hoshma revealing and showing them her clitoral hood piercing and clitoris piercings. All the earrings in the store were of the clip-on variety and she wasn’t going to use them anywhere near her nipples or vagina, maybe on her belly-button, if she could find the right design.
There was no rule against students visiting Diagon Alley via Floo and nothing set up to stop them or monitor them. In fact there couldn’t be, Gringotts maintained only a single location in Diagon Ally. And as most students weren’t prepared to keep large amounts of gold of in their dorm rooms were it could be stolen they required access to Diagon Alley and Gringotts so they had money to spend, otherwise the Hogsmeade visits were pointless. However if you where gone from Hogsmeade for too long it was noticed and they started looking for you and you got in trouble, normally a suspension of you Hogsmeade privileges. With her delay while examining the shops had already been seen around Hogsmeade for a while and so for the purposes of visiting Diagon Alley she would be counted as part of the next group of students, who had yet to arrive, she would have enough of time.
Using the Floo in the Hogs Head instead of the Three Broomsticks to reduce the chances of being seen and reduce the time available to her she travelled to the Leaky Cauldron. A quick look in the stores in Diagon Alley revealed they were no better, so Parvati, armed with the full knowledge of now bad fashion was in the Wizarding World made an extra large withdrawal from the Gringotts account she had, she had a lot of books to buy and even more reading to do. Some of the money she had converted to pounds, there would be just enough time for her to visit a near by muggle dress shop and buy three dresses suitable for the dates Harry was taking Hermione, her sister and her over the next two nights.
The dresses she got were the simplest and most generic dresses they had in stock but were appropriate for the dates Harry was taking the girls on. She also purchased dresses a bit too big for their intended wearers, that way if she got the sizes wrong she could always use shrinking charms to make them smaller. Hermione got a periwinkle blue dress with white accents. For her sister and herself Padma had an immense stroke of luck, the store had a pair of identical blue dress with sliver accents in about their size, the accent pieces were on the same side of the dresses but Padma thought she knew a spell to change that, if not all the books she would soon be buying on clothes design should fix that. It would be the perfect chance for Harry to get used to dealing with them while they were being identical will still allowing him an out so that he could tell them apart. Plus they needed practice for when they where seen in public with Harry and the ‘Left and Right Twins’ wasn’t something they had much practice with as it was almost a subset of the 'Can't tell them apart’ act, but hopefully they would look good on Harry’s arms at some point.