Mrs Tanaka-Svenska, accompanied by Louis Mariette, who created her headpiece, said: "The dress code has always been quite strict but we always bend the rules slightly - they know us here.
"So in a way I think for them it's slightly abstract that they know there's some problem on the left hand side, and they use strategies to try and overcome the problem, without really being able to appreciate it in its fullness".
And yet, over-all, the Chinese seem to prefer, if only slightly, the panda slugger they know to the one they don't.
Then you want slightly older people, because they know the history, and they know how to get things done too, how to get a pothole fixed or negotiate the bureaucracy downtown.
"I am very aware that most people will be afraid that it's going to be a long and perhaps slightly boring evening because they know it is maybe not the best piece by Verdi.
But the French don't seem to mind the slightly dowdy setting, and they know that Les Arcs and La Plagne provide ski-in, ski-out access to the same mountain range, the Vanoise, as their more chic neighbors.
This being a quietly sophisticated and rather post-modern country, Belgians respond with multiple layers of irony, celebrating things about themselves that they know are slightly underwhelming (their fried potatoes, say, or the fact that Belgium's well-illuminated motorway network is visible from space at night), and turning foreigners' jibes back on themselves.
While one or two of the street urchin works can evoke certain Calvin Klein ads (especially the painting "The Statue Seller," with its reclining nude boy), Mancini grants his young subjects considerable dignity and a slightly shellshocked awareness, as if they know what life has in store.
"Most women are likely to be attacked by someone they know, but it's striking that indigenous women are more likely than non-indigenous women to be attacked by someone they don't know or that they know only slightly," Stanton said.
In Wal-Mart, a woman they knew slightly approached them and said: "I've been keeping up with that stuff in the paper.
