Research into the clothing worn by rural inhabitants in various regions of Poland has long been an important branch of national ethnography. Over the years, interviews have been used to collect numerous statements about how people dressed and when. This information was often treated as an objective description of the past. This article aims to propose an alternative method of analysis based on tools developed by folklorists. It should be remembered that stories about the past are a communal good constructed in the present, and are therefore adapted to the context and current needs. When we examine only what clothing looked like in the past, such statements may seem useless or even misleading. However, they are valuable from the perspective of folkloristic narrative analysis, as they testify to how our interlocutors perceived the world and how they categorised the phenomena they encountered. The presented analysis is based on many years of field research in Wilamowice and on the border between Silesia and Lesser Poland.