Clothes wearing you?

I did a tiny bit of shopping over break. I had gone to the mall to look for a new pair of trainers (they say that 500 miles is the absolute maximum on a pair, and as I'm doing roughly 25 miles a week - if the cross-country ski exerciser wears them out as much as jogging would... then I'm generally overdue to replace them every 6 months or so).

I did find a pair. They're very...turquoise. Extremely bright, won't match with any of my clothes but they were the most comfortable and best fitting pair I found.

But I also wound up buying a dress and a skirt, which I was not planning on. Walking by Christopher and Banks, I saw a dress in the window - on a mannequin - and thought, "Wow, that's a cute dress, I wonder how it would look on me.

It's a black and white print - probably not the BEST colors for me, but if I get a couple of pastel chiffon scarves to wear at the neckline that will offset the not-the-best-colors effect. It's knit - polyester and spandex - which normally I don't like, but I think it's a thin enough knit that I'll be able to wear it on all but the hottest days here. (The wonders of the Internet: you can see the "official" photo of it here).

When I got in and saw it on the rack, I was kind of like, "maybe no" because the dress looks like NOTHING on the hanger - limp and draggy. But I put it on and was surprised....quite surprised. I thought when I took it off the hanger, "This is just going to make all of my 'problem areas' look huge and I'm going to look like a tank in it."

Nope. The little bit of shirring around the waist - and the fact that it's a high waist - makes me look slimmer than I actually feel like I am. And the dress accentuates, um, other parts. I was quite surprised. (I did wind up having to install a couple of snaps on the top, because it opens a little lower than I liked it to. Or maybe I have a higher bust than is standard, I don't know)

And it strikes me that maybe that's the difference in the high-fashion, fashion-as-art world (which I don't have much truck with) and good basic clothing design...whether the person is wearing the clothes, or the clothes are "wearing" the person, so to speak.

My reaction to the dress (which I did ultimately buy, of course) was "Wow, I look good in this dress." Not so much, "Wow, this is an innovative dress" (it's really just a bit of a riff off of the 1970s wrap-dresses - while it's not a wrap-dress per se, the style is similar) or "wow, this is high fashion" - I was thinking more about how *I* looked in the dress than how the dress itself looked.

But I think the fashion-as-art world expects you to look at the dress, not the person in it - or not some combination of the dress and the person. Which would explain why some of the high-concept fashion things are stuff no "everyday" woman would ever consider wearing, or that lots of women think are designed to make women look "ugly." And why there's a demand for extremely slim models - basically, they are hangers or easels for the dresses, rather than someone whose body you'll actually see in the dress.

And I think that's a big part of the discontent some women - especially bigger women like me - have with high fashion. If you're a size 14, you CAN'T hide behind the dress. You're THERE. People will see you. And dresses that look good on a size 0 or a size 2 don't necessarily look good scaled up. And what looks good on a 14 (and yes, despite what some of the haters say, larger women CAN look good in clothes) won't necessarily look good scaled down...but the high-fashion world doesn't really consider that. (Then again: how many people outside of Hollywood red carpets or maybe "Allegedly-Real Housewives of Whereever" wear high-fashion clothing?)

I don't think it is, as some people claim, a hatred of women (or even necessarily a hatred of bigger women, though I have read of a certain...disgust? voiced by some designers that a woman could LET herself get bigger than a size 6. Dear designer, why not try on my genes for size and see?). But I think it's that it's kind of a closed world that doesn't really relate to those of us who teach, or work in banks, or do engineering, or are cooks, or whatever. (Because a lot of the high fashion clothes also look rather impractical).

So I'm not sure about the idea of banning models smaller than a certain size.  I can see that leading to all kinds of red tape and problems and stuff like "doctors" ("Hello, Dr. Nick!" "Hello, everybody!") being paid off to claim that a tiny small woman is just NATURALLY tiny-small, and so it's OK for her to work. And unlike some bigger women, I'm not offended by the existence of tiny models. (I will admit to wistfully wondering how certain clothes would look on a person my size, but that's more a complaint with some catalog and magazine stuff, rather than catwalk work)

So my response to the fashion world is kind of a shrug and a "whatever." They do stuff, it doesn't really affect my life. I don't think I've ever owned a dress that cost more than $300 (the most costly one being the custom-made bridesmaid dress from when my brother married). I admit, I see dresses in magazines like "Real Simple" and think, "wow, that's cute" but immediately follow that thought with, "Yipes, that's what I budget as spending-on-fun money for a month and a half" and often follow it with, "Meh, they probably don't make it in my size."

I don't know. If I had more time and more ready access to a really good fabric store here I'd probably sew most of my own dresses; the really nice ones I've had recently have been ones where I bought a pattern, fitted it to myself, and then made the dress myself.