Butterfly Cauldron

It's a strange occurance for me, but I'm feeling decidedly girly lately. It's not just because of The Possibility (who is not, by the way, any longer a possiblity. I remembered why 21 year olds are not for women my age, thank ya very much. But, on to the next fish.) This weekend, I got my hair cut and I just rather adore it. It's still long, but no longer unshaped and dull. It frames my face nicely and looks a bit sassy. It also makes me look closer to my age. Go me!

I also bought new lipstick. I am addicted to lipstick and lip gloss. I cannot help it. It's a strangeness. But I picked up two new tubes of lipstick and multi-pack pot o'gloss. So my lips look smoking.

Plus, I've shaved. I don't shave. It's against my nature, or so I thought. But no, this time, I thought I'd shave. I have so little hair on my body at the moment, I feel naked when I'm clothed. But, it's an interesting feeling. I kinda like it. Hrm.

Also, regular, daily applications of body lotion. Well, baby lotion actually. Because it makes my skin soooo soft. Which is good, because my elbows and knees get really dry in the winter and crack, then bleed. Now, definately no bleeding or cracking. Just lots of smooth, smooth, ubersoft skin. It's really nice.

I'm feeling decidedly feminine lately. And I want to wear dresses! I never want to wear dressed. I'm anti-dress. But, I'm thinking, I'm not really anti-dress. I'm anti-the-kind-o-dresses-I-was-raised-to-wear. Which is: boring, aged, no fun at all.

The kind of dresses I want? These:





I totally want that green one for next spring. And the brown one? Come on. It's adorable. I am a little concerned about my arms though. They are not just big, but rather flabby. Well, the tops anyway. My lower arms are quite shapely. Go figure. So, since I will be wearing these dresses come spring, I bought myself a set of simple weights to work on toning up my upper arms. I figure, I do that regularly, by the time spring shows up, my arms will be amazing. And then it's tank-tops and strappy sundresses. Dammit.

Labels: clothing, fun

The subject of this article had such promise. What the hell is wrong with the way women's clothing is sized? It's insane. I never know what size I'm going to wear when I go to try on clothing. I have one store that I know I can go into to buy a bra off the rack and it will fit. I have an other store I go to if I want a good pair of blue jeans, because I have one brand that I can count on for size. If I want dress clothing or shirts? Another store or two. And what makes me crazy is that my pants size is TWO sizes smaller than my shirt size, even though I'm pretty evenly made all over. I've got a figure-eight figure -- like an hourglass, only more ample ;) And yet....I wear different sizes in different stores in different brands because there's no standard sizing in women's sizes. So, you know, good topic for an article.

But, of course, it soon devolves into "everyone wants to be skinny!!"

Ugh. Seriously. Ugh.

I don't want to be skinny. I don't even care what size the tag says. I just want to be able to go into a store, pull something off the shelf in that size and have it fit! Everywhere I go. At every damned store. I hate this guesswork!

Grr.

As any woman who tries on clothes frequently can attest, a 6 in one place can indeed be a 14 somewhere else — or an 8, a 10, or a 2. Which makes you wonder: Is there any logic to sizes, or are they just a random jumble of numbers?
The question might not matter, if the whole issue of size didn’t matter. But as the fashion industry has long known, a woman’s size certainly does matter — to her. Call it the psychology of size: We care deeply about the number on that tag, even though it’s likely no one else will see it, save the person manning the cash register. Perhaps no one else will know, but WE know, and that’s enough.
Just ask another Andy — Andy Steiner, a mother of two in St. Paul, Minn.
“I hate to admit it,” says Steiner, 38, “’cause I know size is just a number and I like to think I’m too smart — and feminist — to fall for that. But I certainly have a size I consider myself. Of course, I’ll buy smaller — and maybe one size bigger. But I’d never buy two sizes bigger. Way too depressing!”
Steiner recalls a particularly rash fashion decision three years ago, when she bought a pricey, too-short designer dress in hot pink, a color she dislikes. But it was a size 2, and she was literally flattered into buying it.
Not just the everyday shopper gets fooled. Suze Yalof Schwartz, executive editor-at-large for Glamour magazine, loves walking into a store and finding she’s a size lower. “It can make you feel fantastic,” she says. “It’s like stepping on a scale. It can make your day. Or, it can ruin your day.”
And that feeling, of course, will directly impact whether you make the purchase.

Okay, has anyone actually ever done that? Bought something they didn't like just because it was a smaller size than they usually get? Seriously?

“Designers know that nobody wants to be a big size,” says maternity designer Liz Lange. “Nobody wants to be more than a size 8 or a 10.” And she includes herself. “I can’t do it,” she says of buying a larger size. “I don’t want that thing in my closet!”
And yet vanity sizing doesn’t explain most of the disparity. The larger picture is that every designer uses their own silhouette, or “fit model,” based on their target audience, says Dan Butler of the National Retail Federation. There were once government guidelines for sizing, he says, but they were abandoned decades ago, and were never mandatory. Maybe that’s a good thing, says Yalof Schwartz: “Everyone would be depressed. I’d rather feel skinnier.”

Woooh. Hold back that disgust will ya? Shit, an 8 or a 10 is considered too big? What the hell? I haven't been a size 10 since I was 10! (No kidding that, I started developing waaay early. The smallest I remember being was a size 13....when I was 13. Oh, the joy of my "fat" childhood. I also happened to be getting close to 6 foot at the time, but somehow no one thought to tell me that my body was working out quite nicely and proportional. Nope, I was just the fat kid.)

Not every woman cares about size. Some are more like, well, men, who tend to be more pragmatic. “I think many men do care about what size their waist is,” says New Yorker James Cribbs. “However, I can’t imagine any of them would buy something they don’t like just because it fits. Why not move on until you find something that fits AND that you like?”
Sounds so sensible. It certainly would avoid tales like that of Steiner’s hot pink, “it-was-the-size-2-talking” purchase.
She wore the dress once, to a wedding, where she covered it with a shawl. “I wanted to pull out the size label and show people why I bought it,” she laughs. She ended up lending it to a friend, who also wore it once.
So did the friend like it?
“She was happy to be a size 2.”

Oh, of course. Why can't a woman be more like a man? Uh, because the idiot designers can't standardize their sizes and fucking society is telling us that a size 10 is obese? Maybe? You think? Goddamn, I hate this shit. Grrr.

(And a size 2? I realize there are people naturally that small, but come on! The only thing I think when I see someone that thin is how I desperately want to take her home and let my mother feed her!)

(Oh, btw, that gorgeous dress up there? (That I want, want want!) Can be found here at Zaftique. I adore their clothing and they all fit me! Whoohoo.)

Labels: clothing, fat

Maybe I'm lucky, or maybe I'm just odd, but I haven't really experienced the pressure to conform my appearance to social standards in ways most women seem too. Maybe it comes from the fact that I'm a fat girl and society has just given up on getting me to look the way it wants me to. Or maybe I've been getting pressured, but I just haven't noticed it. A few places I read have been talking about clothing/appearance choices lately (See here for example.) and it's got me thinking -- why do I choose to wear the things I wear? Why do I choose to style my hair like I do? To wear or not wear make-up? How much of it is my own free choice and how much of it is stuff I picked up from society?

When I was a little girl, my mother dressed me in pretty dresses (lots of yellow ones, for some reason) and shoes and barrettes and all the girly things that little girls are dressed in. I don't remember much of it, but there are pictures, so I know it is so. When I was old enough, I stopped wearing dressed. I don't like them. I don't like skirts, either. It's hard for me to move in them, it's hard for me to sit comfortably and I don't like the picture of me they present to the world at large. Part of that is because my mother wears dresses every Sunday and gets all prettied-up when she goes out and entertains. And, well, I had a decided need to rebel against my mother. But that was when I was a teenager. To this day, I don't wear dresses unless I have to. Why? Because I don't like them. I honestly don't. I don't feel comfortable in them, I don't like that it tells the world I'm a "girly" girl (because I'm so not). I don't like the expectation that I'm going to wear them, just because I'm female.

But mostly, it's comfort. I like the way pants feel. I like the way shorts feel, too. Even though the world wants to tell me I'm too fat to wear shorts, I don't care. They're comfortable. When it's hot, they're cool. I want to be cool and comfortable, not hot and cranky. Ergo, I wear shorts in the summer and pants to work. I don't think about if they make me look sexy. I don't think about if they'll make people look at me. I just think I want to be comfortable.

Some of that comes, I think, from growing up on a farm. There was a lot of work to do and you might as well be comfortable doing it. I also prefer to go barefoot. Because that feels better to me. I like the feeling of the grass or the rock or the dirt under my feet. The first thing I do, every day, when I get home from work, it take off my shoes. And the shoes I do wear are very specific -- sandals in the summer, boots in the winter. I don't wear tennis shoes or jogging shoes and I absolutely, never, ever wear heels. I cannot walk in heels, they make my feet hurt and why would I do that to myself?

I like bright colors and soft fabrics. I like funky patterns and interesting jewelry. I hate mainstream fashion, partially because none of it is made for a body like mine and partially because, aethetically, I find it displeasing. But where do those preferences come from?

I think what I'm asking is, the portion of our choices made because we simply like something, how much is that influenced by where we come from? If I hadn't grown up on a farm or had a mother who is stereotypically feminine, would I still have the same preferences I have? If I had grown up in a city and had a mother who eshewed 'girly' things, would I still prefer a bohemian look? Or would I be one of those women who wears heels and hose and make-up everyday?

I'm not making any judgements on what any woman wears, by the way. I'm assuming, at least on some level, that she dresses the way she dresses because she's getting something out of it. Maybe she enjoys it, maybe she's using it to send certain messages, maybe she's dressing to get ahead in her career. Who knows? I certainly don't, no more than she knows why I dress like I do. I'm just wonder if society, in general, has as big an impact on our clothing/appearance choices as some bloggers suggest. I'm not doubting it has an impact, but I'm wondering if maybe our family of origin has the bigger influence.

Labels: clothing, fat, feminism

So, they're talking about clothing over at Feministing and it got me thinking. It's not an easy task finding clothing, that I like, to fit.

The reason for this are two-fold. One, I'm fat. Two, I'm tall. I'm tall in the way I'm fat -- not a little, but a ways up the scale. I'm 5'11, which is a perfectly normal height for a man but really unusually for a woman. Except for the women in my family, who are all my height or taller. (In fact, I'm the shortest woman born into my family. We're a buncha Amazons, we are.) Thanks to the nice people at Just My Size, I can generally find jeans long enough. Everything else? Eh, it's a crap shoot.

On the one hand, I'm lucky that my job doesn't require me to be dressy. I do all my work online, so I can get away with wearing blue jeans, t-shirts and sandals on a daily basis. Which is very good, because that's about the only thing I can find with any ease. I've got a few skirts, all significantly shorter on me than they were originally intended to be, and a pair of black slacks I lucked upon, but that's pretty much it. Hose? Tights? Ha! Good luck with that. Apparently, fat girls cannot also be tall girls. In order to get a pair of hose long enough for me, I have to get hose that are way, way, way too big around. If I decide I want to get them to fit my waist/hips, I have to get them entirely too short -- which renders them unwearable.

Dress shirts are pretty much out of the question. They don't make them long enough. Why is that? I need a shirt that comes down a bit below my waist. Why is that so very hard to find? I can find t-shirts and tanks that are long enough, but not dress shirts. Does that make any sense? And, should I manage to find one that is long enough, it gaps across the bust. Now, my breasts are beautiful and I'm certainly no prude. I like a bit of cleavage. But I don't need to be spilling out of my shirt on job interviews.

Because I'm poor, I have no money for a tailor. I also don't have the money to spend the amount may specialty stores want for plus-size fashion. And the paradox is, my inability to find clothing to reflect a higher station impedes my ability to achieve said higher station.

This concerns me, in part because I'm getting ready to interview for a job soon. One that has the potential to spring me from my poverty. (Oh, such sweet possiblity!!) I can see it already, me standing in front my closet once more, trying to find something to wear that suits the job, muttering under my breath. It's not just clothing, it's potential and the future. And so may 'average' sized women (and don't be me started on THAT term) take for granted that they can walk into any department store and pick something off the rack.

Labels: clothing, fat