Where did the Weasley children learn how to dress like Muggles?

Question

In The Goblet of Fire, Uncle Vernon asks Harry what the Weasleys will be wearing when they pick him up, and that he's seen what wizards wear.

'I've seen the sort of stuff your lot wear. They'd better have the decency to put on normal clothes, that's all.'

Harry felt a slight sense of foreboding. He had rarely seen Mr. or Mrs. Weasley wearing anything that the Dursleys would call "normal". Their children might don Muggle clothing during the holidays, but Mr. and Mrs. Weasley usually wore long robes in varying states of shabbiness.

So where would the Weasley children have learned about Muggle attire?

Answer 1

The Weasleys live in a village with both wizard and Muggle inhabitants, so they would have had plenty of exposure to Muggle children and seen what kind of things they wear. They seem to visit the village on occasion. Two examples that I can think of being:

• Fred and George impress a pretty girl in the village with some magic tricks:

  ‘We’re off to the village, there’s a very pretty girl working in the paper shop who thinks my card tricks are something marvellous ... almost like real magic ...’

  _{Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, Chapter 16: A Very Frosty Christmas.}

• In Deathly Hallows, while attending Bill and Fleur's wedding, Harry is disguised using Polyjuice potion and the hair from a redheaded boy from the village (and passed off as another Weasley cousin). This only occurs in the book though, in the movie he's not in disguised at all:

  Harry had taken a large dose of Polyjuice Potion and was now the double of a redheaded Muggle boy from the local village, Ottery St Catchpole, from whom Fred had stolen hairs using a Summoning Charm. The plan was to introduce Harry as ‘Cousin Barny’ and trust to the great number of Weasley relatives to camouflage him.

  _{Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Chapter 8: The Wedding.}

Answer 2

From most of what we read in King's Cross Station, it would appear that most, if not all, wizarding children know how to dress like muggles. I'd imagine like the Weasley children, most have muggle as well as wizard neighbors. They probably pick up on fashions from seeing them, and have to interact with them enough that they learn.

It appears as well that as wizards age, they tend to forget this simple knowledge they had growing up. The Quidditch World Cup gives us several examples of wizards dressing very poorly by muggle standards. Perhaps dressing isn't like riding a bike.

Answer 3

Their father works in a department that routinely handles muggle artefacts. This would at least give him a passing knowledge of how to dress as a muggle, even if it wouldn't give him all the specifics.