Karen suggested ages ago that I should blog about clothing or fashion for larger women, seeing as it’s a bit of a bug bear of mine.  Then Jelssie today had a post about how to buy clothes.  And I thought...hmm...I really have been meaning to write about this.  So I will.  I guess I’ll break it into a bunch of posts because there is a lot in this topic and I’ll probably wander off into rant mode.  Feel free to comment as I go along – it might inform my future posts.

However, I also love to dress well.  I love getting dressed up and going to the Opera House for a show.  I love putting on clothes that make me feel good about how I look when I go out for dinner.  I love putting on a killer pair of high heels and a great dress and going dancing (though I do that a lot less these days).  But unless you are an average height size 10 with a smallish bust and narrow waist, who also earns over $80,000 a year, it is also becoming increasingly more frustrating to find clothes that are:

• well made
• properly fitting in the bust, waist and hips
• the right length in the leg or sleeves
• beautiful
• affordable

And I am certainly not an average height size 10 with a smallish bust and narrow waist, who also earns over $80,000 a year.

The problem of dressing well
Let’s say I want to buy a new top for meetings or going out to dinner or something.  You would think it would be a matter of going to a shop, seeing a few things that appeal, trying them on, buying something, leaving the shop with my task complete and a spring in my step.

It’s usually more like this:  I walk past all the shops I know won’t have anything that will remotely fit me, go into one of the few shops that might have appropriate things, see something appealing.  Flip through the rack and see there are only size 8s left.  Move on.  Reject anything with buttons because it will gape.  Reject anything with structured seams across the bust because the seams won’t fit my bust.  Reject anything high necked or round necked because I know it won’t suit my shape.  Pick the only two tops left in my size that fit any of those criteria, even though I don’t like either of them.  Try them on and feel revoltingly large and unattractive in both.  Overhear a girl in the next cubicle calling to the sales girl, “Do you have this in a size 6?  I think this 8 is too big” and resist the urge to barge in and strangle her*.  Hang tops back up, even though I want to hurl them to the ground, and try to be polite as I hand them back to the sales girl at the changing room door who says, “No good?” in a tone that mocks me for even thinking they’d be any good.  Quickly walk out of the shop and try again at the next one, with even less self-confidence, and wonder whether I should just give up on trying to look presentable and start making my own clothes out of hessian sacks.

That sounds like hyperbole, but I would hazard a guess that many of my female readers can identify with aspects of that story.

Why is shopping for clothing so difficult?  Note that this is before we even take into account the vagaries and quirks of fashion.  This is just a yearning to buy clothing that looks good, is made well and fits properly.

The basics
Before we even get into the whole fashion aspect of clothing, there are the basics.  I don’t know a great deal about men’s clothing, but it seems a lot simpler than women’s clothing.  There are fewer options, for one thing – it generally comes down to a shirt of some kind (t shirt or button up shirt?), pants of some kind (trousers, jeans or shorts?) and maybe a jacket.  And although men do vary in shape, the variations tend to be mostly in height and girth.  So to size clothing up and down is a lot easier – you only have to make it longer, shorter, wider or narrower.

But with women’s clothing it becomes more complicated.  Not only do we have more options in terms of garment type – tops, blouses, shirts, skirts, shorts, trousers, dresses – but we also have curves.  Yes, curves are wondrous things and bring many pleasing body shapes.  But they are a bitch to dress.

The curse of the curves
I guess for clothing manufacturers it’s an issue of practicality. Look around at all the different shapes and sizes of people you see around you in the street, and then think about producing a garment that would fit each and every one of them perfectly.  It’s just not feasible, is it?  So designers then have to make broad, sweeping generalizations in terms of size and fit, and some of them don’t even attempt to make clothes that would fit real people.  That would take time, research, and effort, and when you’re trying to pump as much product out into the market as quickly you can, it’s just not cost-effective.  So they make their designs, scale them up and down into different sizes, but don’t think about how a size 16’s body differs from a size 8’s body.

I’m not encouraging you to ogle women and call it research, but if you briefly glance around, you will see that the shape and position of women’s breasts vary a lot.  Some sit high, some low, some are large, some small (I’m starting to sound like the book on puberty we had as kids What’s happening to me? (it was such a gem, and companion to the earlier book, Where did I come from?)).  So if we take something like a simple, button up shirt as an example, and remember that we have to make broad generalizations about fit when designing such a shirt, we immediately run into problems.  What fits beautifully on a stationary dressmakers’ dummy with a rigid 10B bust size is not necessarily going to work on a woman who moves and has a size 14DD bust, even if she buys a size 14 or 16 shirt.  The shirt will strain at the buttons or sit oddly or gape embarrassingly.

The same goes for women with broad hips or slight hips, large bums or flat bums, big thighs, skinny thighs…and it doesn’t follow that because someone has wide hips that she will be similarly wide in the top half of her body.  Even though I love, love, love wearing them, dresses are one of the most ludicrous things to buy for me, as my top half is between a size 16 and 18 (if I’m lucky) and my lower half is more like a size 14.  So if it fits at the top, it will billow like a maternity gown at the bottom, and if it fits at the bottom, there’s no chance I’ll even be able to squeeze in at the top.

I was going to direct you to the Trinny and Susannah website for more info on body shapes and all the wonderful varieties, but it seems to be undergoing a bit of an overhaul and I can’t find the info I wanted to link to.  Still, you can read the bit about Defining your shape, even if the pictures that go with it seem to have disappeared.  Though I did see at the Westfield site that T&S are visiting Australia in October if you’re interested in hearing them critique peoples’ fashion sense (though I would recommend staying out of their line of sight in case they do audience participation).

That’s enough for the time being. In upcoming posts I’ll probably talk more about the whole fashion aspect, the cost of good clothing and I’m sure there will be a rant on bras and swimsuits in there somewhere too.  Stay tuned!

* I do understand that many small women also find it hard to find clothing that fits and have the opposite problem to mine...but it can be particularly vexing when you’re stuck with a too-small garment over one arm and half your torso to hear someone complaining that something is too big.