Funny, Katie - I was just looking at the newest Vt. Country Store catalog last night, and the simple little knit dresses they had - green, red, or blue, with a white floral - and I thought, "That might almost work."
Though really these days, I like things a bit more fitted. (Actually, I suspect there are more mail-order places out there that have dresses; I just need to find ones with sufficiently good return policies so if I get the dress and find it doesn't fit right, I can send it back).
If I had a nearby friend who actually sewed, and whose time I felt comfortable making some minor demands on, I'd go out and buy a few dress patterns and ask her to help me fit them. But I don't quite know anyone like that here. Because once the fitting is done, I can pretty much manage on my own. (Though it helps to have a second person when it comes to hemming.)
I was also reading through the Real Simple that came over break, and they had some cute dresses in there....but at $450 as an average price, not something that's in my budget. (Also, it seems to me, as the price goes up on a line, the sizing options go down. "Zaftig Women Need Not Apply" and all that.)
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Speaking of which, on the morning news, they were discussing some new "French" diet (basically a rework of the Atkins diet, it sounded like) and they noted Kate Middleton was on it.
Um. Wait. The pictures I've seen of her? She's (IMHO) sufficiently slender already.
They talked about it as if it were something she was doing as a "get ready for the wedding" thing. This is something I simply do not get - women going on diets (though this one seems less extreme than what I've seen some women do) before getting married. Because:
1. Isn't planning a wedding (and yeah, I know, Middleton won't really be planning anything...it's probably all already pre-ordained) stressful enough, without either walking around hungry a lot of the time or being mildly obsessed by food (which is what dieting seems to do to most people)?
2. I understand the thing about wanting to look "good" for photos, but don't you really more want photos that "look like" you? And if your natural tendency is to be, I don't know, 5' 4" and 145 pounds, won't ekeing yourself down to 115 or so make you look not-quite-like yourself, at least not the "yourself" when your weight goes back up to normal? (Because for most people who diet, it does, eventually, without some kind of eternal maintenance of the diet)
3. (I realize this is a pretty sexist reason but): Didn't they guy ALREADY say he wanted you in his life? I mean, if I had a boyfriend, and he said, "I'd love to marry you, just lose 40 pounds first," I'd have a few choice words for him and then be looking for a new boyfriend. I mean, it's one thing to want to lose the weight for health purposes (and yes, by the old insurance charts, I could stand to lose 40 pounds...though it's possible some of that is muscle), but it's another to be told by someone (who is not your doctor) to.
Also, for a lot of men? The super-skinny look doesn't seem to be that appealing. (Women tend to be far more tough on other women's appearance than men tend to be - and yes, one of the morning show people brought that up, to her credit).
But it just seems strange to me to go on a diet shortly before the wedding. Do it after the honeymoon, do it during the engagement - but during the crazy flurry leading up to the date, cut yourself some slack.
(The other thing I've seen about diets...and maybe some people on diets do go for this, because of the attention it gets them...it can lead to a certain amount of public martyrdom, where they sigh heavily and roll their eyes and go, "but you KNOW I CAN'T eat THAT!!!" or where they ask waiters endlessly detailed questions about what goes in the food and how it's prepared. People with real health concerns - like celiac or allergies - learn how to do that kind of thing unobtrusively, but I've been out to eat with some new dieters who seemed to want to make the whole meal about themselves and what they couldn't eat and how tortured they were by it, and it just sucked all the fun out of going out to eat.)
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And yes, Diane Bish. I used to watch her show pretty regularly (one of the PBS channels where I lived used to run it around 1 pm on Sundays - so I would come home from church and put that on, and either watch it or have it on in the background while doing other things).
(I think she's still on, at least in re-runs? Maybe on EWTN?)
Also, the mother of one of my childhood friends was the organist at their church, and I remember she had her "organ shoes" - lower heel than what she usually wore, and also had a strap across the instep to be sure they stayed on. (And I seem to remember the recently-retired organist of my current church keeping a pair like that next to the organ, and changing out of her dressier shoes).
Actually, I suspect a lot of those super-high-heeled, not-easy-to-walk-in shoes are partly what some would call a "clothing semiotic" - kind of like the long fingernails supposedly cultured by the Mandarins (to indicate that they didn't need to do manual labor), fancy impractical shoes probably say, "I don't really need to walk very far; my main purpose in these is to be decorative." For those of us working Janes who are on our feet maybe 6 hours a day some days, we require shoes that will actually hold up to some wear, and won't become actively painful after a while. (And to think of it...I'm not sure how OK I would be with the idea of myself-as-purely-decorative-object. I've made a living by my brain for long enough to tend to think most of my value to society lies there. (And at any rate: beauty can fade but (barring any kind of horrible accident/disease) smart is pretty much lifelong.)
Besides, there's probably a point where as a lady-professor, you have to tone it down*. (I once had a student - and this was an entirely male class, so I know it was a guy writing it - on his anonymous evaluation comment, remark that he "loved" me, which made me go "eep" a little bit. Of course, "love" can mean a lot of things, and he (probably) meant it as he learned a lot in my class and thought I was intelligent and organized and he could learn well from me, but after getting that comment I admit that for quite a while I checked my dresses and blouses to make sure they didn't even approach being décolleté. (Not that they were to begin with).
(*Heh. Now I'm thinking of Novella D'Andrea and her veil (though a different source said she lectured "from behind a curtain" to avoid distracting her students).
2 comments:
You might want to check out the size measurements in a catalogue that interests you. Then measure a dress you already have that fits the way you like. Compare those measurements and order the size in the catalogue that is closest.
Another thought is that the next time you go home, get a sewing pattern and have your mother help you fit it.
For myself, I order some of my things from catalogues and just order the size I would buy in the store. Most of the time, that works for me. When it doesn't, I send them back. That might mean having to pay the return postage myself but that's better than keeping something which doesn't fit.
I've often had the thought that high heeled shoes with pointy toes are the modern American equivalent of foot binding, which, if you read up on it, was even more horrible than we think it was, so although that kind of shoes are not really that bad it's still the same sort of idea - the suffering to be beautiful or even just to fit in. In China back when they did foot binding most people probably didn't think that was all that bad either because they were used to it.
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