Sometimes people try to offer me fashion advice. They say there is so much out there for big girls. But they’re thinking about a very specific kind of big girl. There is very little out there for a very big girl like me.
Buying clothes is an ordeal. It is but one of many humiliations fat people endure. I hate clothes shopping and have for years because I know I’m not going to find anything I actually want to wear. We hear the statistics about how obesity is a major problem in the United States, and yet there are a mere handful of stores where fat people can buy clothes. At most of those stores, the clothes are hideous.
Generally, we can go to Lane Bryant, the Avenue, Catherines. Other stores—Maurices, Old Navy, various department stores—offer a small selection of plus-sized clothing. There are online purveyors of plus-sized clothing, but they are hit-or-miss. And there is this—most of these stores have nothing to offer for the super morbidly obese. Lane Bryant’s sizes generally go to 28, and the same goes for most other stores. The Avenue, more generously, offers clothing up to size 32. If you are larger than that, and I am larger than that, there are so very few options. Being fashionable is not among them.
There is also the option of wearing men’s clothes, and sometimes I do. Men have a few more choices in that larger sizes are often carried in department stores. Still, there are relatively few offerings, and in recent years, they’ve all been consolidated under the Casual Male/Destination XL banner.
During my twenties, I preferred men’s clothing because I could hide my femininity, feeling it made me safer. But men’s clothes are often ill-fitting. They are not designed and constructed to accommodate breasts and curves and hips. They are not designed to make a girl feel pretty.
With so few clothing options available to me, I am full of longing. There is so much I don’t get to do. There are no fun shopping trips to the mall. There is no sharing clothes with friends. My person can’t really buy me clothes as a gift. I flip through fashion magazines and covet what I see, while knowing that such beauty is, for now, beyond my reach. These are trivial wants but they aren’t.
In the big cities I frequent, mostly New York and Los Angeles, I become increasingly aware of my lack of style as impeccably dressed people surround me wearing the kinds of clothing I would love to wear, if only . . .
I rarely feel attractive or sexy or well dressed. I hardly know what it feels like to wear something I truly want or like. If I find something that fits, I buy it because there is so little that fits. I don’t like patterns. I don’t like appliqué. Fat-girl clothes designers never got this memo.
I am angry that the fashion industry is completely unwilling to design for a more diverse range of human bodies.
In my teens and early twenties, I often went clothes shopping with my mother and I could always see her dismay at where I am forced to shop. I could see that she wished her daughter had a different body. I could see her humiliation and frustration. Sometimes, she told me, “I hope this is the last time we have to shop here,” and I murmured my agreement. I harbored the same hope. I also knew it wouldn’t be the last time. I harbored no small amount of frustration, or anger, for her words, for her disappointment in me, for my inability to be a good daughter, for one more thing I couldn’t have—the simple pleasure of having fun while shopping with my mother.
A couple years ago, I was in a clothing store, alone. I wanted to find a few nice things to wear. I wanted to look nice for someone who loves me exactly as I am and who makes me care about my appearance and who has taught me to care about myself in ways both great and small. Wanting to look nice for someone was new and I liked it.
I was at this store, looking for some cute, colorful shirts, when a young woman came out of the dressing room crying. The details aren’t mine to share but she was so upset and her mother was treating her in quite a humiliating manner and I wanted to sob right there in the store because it was just too much to see such a familiar and painful scene. Fat daughters and their thin mothers have especially complicated relationships.
I’ve been that girl, too big for the clothes in the store, just trying to find something, anything, that fits, while also dealing with the commentary of someone else who means well but can’t help but make pointed, insensitive comments. To be that girl in a clothing store is to be the loneliest girl in the world.
I am not a hugger, but I wanted to wrap my arms around this girl. I wanted to protect her from this world that is so unbelievably cruel to overweight people. There was nothing I could really do because I know this world. I live in it too. There’s no shelter or safety or escape from the cruel stares and comments, the too-small seats, the too-small everything for your too-big body.
But I followed her to the dressing room and I told her she was beautiful. And she was indeed beautiful. She nodded, tears were streaming down her face. We both went on with our shopping. I wanted to tear her mother’s face off. I wanted to call my person and hear a kind voice. I wanted something to pull me out of the spiral of self-loathing I felt myself tumbling into. I wanted to burn the store down. I wanted to scream.
When the young woman left the store with her mother, she was still crying. I cannot stop picturing her face, that look in her eyes that I know too well, how she was trying to fold in on herself in a body that was so visible. She was trying to disappear and she couldn’t. It is unbearable to want something so little and need it so much.