It’s almost October. The leaves begin to change color and gather on the grass. The sky is more often grey. The winds are cold and frost is on my car some mornings. So, of course, that means scarves, sweaters, jackets, knitwear, long-sleeved t-shirts, and the pièce de résistance: boots. Glory to all, it's time for boots. Which, unfortunately, means I have to go shopping for clothes. In the grey skies thunder begins to roll.
I’ve always imagined entering a clothing store is a mirror imagine of what it's like to be tossed through the gates of hell. You have done some serious wrong in your life and now you must engage the retail associates who ask you every fifteen minutes if you need help or try to sell you a credit card. You have to navigate through the hoards of people all wanting to find the “in thing” or the cheapest deal. You must put up with that mother who brings her four kids under the age of seven and disengage that one boyfriend who was dragged along and now entertains himself in the underwear section—classy. Yes, this alone is hell, but the real fun happens when you're a plus size shopper.
I am a six foot two-inch tall woman and I weigh a hefty two hundred and eighty-seven pounds. 2XL shirts, 20-tall pants, 44D bra, 22-dress size, in the words of Meghan Trainor, “I ain’t no size two.” But my reality is the same as everybody else’s. I put my jeans on one leg at a line (after shapewear), but somewhere along the lines someone decided, “yes, the fat men and women of the world deserve their own stores.” No.
I, for one, want to make it clear plus-size clothing stores are wonderful. They are a haven for larger women who just want clothes that fit well and are decently cute and up-to-date with fashion. Torrid and Lane Byrant allow me to express myself via my clothes, and that's a wonderful magical thing. My
At best, plus-size clothing stores were an ill thought out plan by some well-intentioned plus size person like myself who just wanted to be able to find the highly coveted, rare pair of size 20-tall dark wash jeans, and at worst was some sick individual’s desire to kick out all the “unpretty people” from the average retail clothing store. I like to imagine this latter person as an older version of Chuck Bass from Gossip Girls with the musical voice of Jimmy Fallon’s Sara saying, “Ew, you can’t sit with us.” And, of course, throw in a hand flick for good measure.
Now, for several reasons, this is ridiculously ignorant, but pushing all those aside its just bad business. A twenty-year-old woman now, I’m well past the whole “O.M.G., we should like all go shopping together in like an insanely large group so we can hang out and we can like talk about boys.” Actually, in a moment of honesty, I confess to you I have never been one of those girls but, sickly enough, I could have been.
Let me take you back to eighth grade. The classes were easy, the hormones were racing, cooties had died, boys were attractive and the first boy-girl dance was approaching. Middle school cliques weren’t just a staple they were a manner of survival and I didn’t have one. All the girls in school had entered the stage of what I like to call "teenage girl occult behavior", brought on by the lessons of stranger danger and girl magazines. And that’s when it happened; I was asked to go dress shopping at the mall (insert the Jaws theme song). That moment, right there I could have become someone who likes going to the mall, ordering drinks at Starbucks that were probably less than two percent coffee, and choosing which days we wore which colors collectively. But that never happened (thank goodness) because it was not possible. I was the only plus size girl in that group of sexually confused middle school students. The clothes at the stores I went to didn’t carry sizes small enough for them, and regular retail stores didn’t have sizes large enough for me.
This isn’t a tale of bitterness at lost opportunity. I would’ve said no either way. I would have stayed home and read a book with my dog the night of the dance anyway. I’m not saying being unable to go dress shopping as an eight grader changed my life forever because it didn’t, but realizing at the age of thirteen that there was an ideal view of pretty and places where they could go and buy pretty things and that I didn’t have a place there. Like schools segregated based on skin color, there are places our society puts large, fat, overweight, obese people. Those not fitting the ideal vision of beauty are treated as an isolated minority, though in the United States, they are the majority.
Now I am not ignorant or arrogant enough to believe that because I am overweight I understand the struggles of racism or what religious persecution feels like—I do not. But people assume that because our society has begun to denounce the use of Photoshop in disfiguring and altering the average human body in a way that makes today’s beauty standards unreachable, that progress in positive body images has been made. I'll have you look to Nicole Arbour to prove, this is not the case. Fat shaming isn't a thing: it's the cultural norm.
