Buttercup's Frocks

From Gentlemen Prefer Curves

Maybe I’m one of the few, but I’d like the insight of some other curvy women. I’m a UK size 14/16 and… I hate shopping for clothes. Don’t get me wrong, I like clothes, I love clothes. I like looking pretty and being able to dress nicely, but when I go shopping for clothes I find it so stressful and not at all enjoyable. I feel like all the clothes I like are made for waife-like, delicate, slim women, and that the shop assistants and other slimmer women are laughing and judging me for the things I pick up, look at and eventually buy.

It makes me feel awful, and like I can’t go shopping or look pretty because, as said before, the things I like never look right on me because they’re meant, or advertised on small women. I don’t want to spend my life shleping around in jeans - they’re great for walking the dog, but not for a special night out with the boyfriend, y’know?

So yeah, I guess my main… point/query/wonder is if other larger women feel like this? I know this isn’t an advice blog, so please feel free to delete this if it doesn’t fall within guidelines, I was just curious…

Righty-ho, it’s time for some straight talking, petal. And if I sound a little snippy on occasion it’s only because I’ve been exactly where you are now and yearn to reach back in time and give the younger me a damn good shake. So, deep breath and off we go.

Like you I spent way too much time and emotional energy fixating on what shop assistants and random strangers in the Top Shop communal fitting room were thinking about me as I struggled to yank up yet another recalcitrant zip. (Yeah, communal fitting rooms were all the rage in the UK when I was growing up; imagine the fun of that). And while it’s entirely possible that these people might be making judgements about your body/sartorial choices to puff up their own sense of superiority, chances are they’re way too busy fixating on their own perceived faults. In any case it’s two sides of the same coin because you’d be hard pushed to find a woman anywhere in the western world who doesn’t feel just as crap about herself as you do. Unless, of course, she makes a conscious effort to stop buying into her own oppression. Lest you forget, many highly profitable businesses are built on a firm foundation of female self-loathing – starting with ladymags, which actively encourage women to pass judgement on other women’s bodies as some kind of twisted recompense for making us feel inferior in the first place.

So, you want to feel better about yourself? Let’s start with those confounded ladymags; the biggest favour you can ever do for yourself is to stop buying the fuckers. Seriously, cold turkey for the win. Their sole mission in life is to make you feel like you’re Doing It All Wrong, particularly in relation to having a female body. If all the clothes you ever see are modelled on very tall, very slender, very young models and diminutive, surgically enhanced and photoshopped celebs, then of course over time that will come to represent Normal. But actually it’s you, in all your size 14/16 glory, that represents the actual national average and it doesn’t get more normal than that.

Broaden your horizons; actively look for representations of beauty that buck the paradigm and expose the lie. Thanks to the internet, there are literally thousands of images out there. You may be an inbetweenie but so are plenty of fashion bloggers; some fatshion bloggers too. On the right hand side of this tumblr, for instance you’ll find links to a host of those, who vary in size from superwhoppingdeathfat to moderately plumptious – and they all have awesome style. Steep yourself in some of those images for a while until other types of body start to look just as normal to you as the waifish ones do -  because you know what’s genuinely normal? Diversity!

Okay, now, I’d like to introduce you to someone:-

It’s 1976, (as if you couldn’t tell by the naff lapels and the pendant); she’s 17 and she’s been dieting on and off since the age of 11. The rest of the time she thinks it’s healthy to walk the entire length of Knightsbridge or Oxford Street having skipped breakfast and lunch. Her dinner, when she gets home, will be her “reward” for “being good” all day. When she goes shopping down the Kings Road in her Bus Stop finery she will start off feeling hip at Sloane Square but arrive three hours later at World’s End feeling “inferior” (the word she most often uses to describe herself), because she’s been comparing herself to all the other girls she’s seen along the way, including the glamorous shop assistants whose private conversations she interupted by being inconsiderate enough to ask whether these shoes come in a size 5. She wears a size 14/16 and takes a 38DD bra. The shop assistant at Bentalls told her they “don’t have any call for bras that size”. Beneath her jeans she is wearing a full neck-to-crotch, flesh coloured corset, (the granny kind not the burlesque kind), because that’s what fat girls have to do. (See how fat she is? Especially her belly. Gross). Her girlfriends, meanwhile, wear miniscule cotton knickers and maybe a cute matching bra unless it’s sweltering hot which, incidentally, it is. She is frequently told she looks like Liza Minnelli because, hey, she does.

That fucked up, insecure (and really cute) teen, as you probably deduced, is me. And one of the reasons I felt so utterly shit about myself is because, even back then, my clothing options were almost as limited as they are now at a size 22/24 because every high street clothing store back then had a size 14 cut-off. The clothes you like aremade for you! Pretty much every mainstream clothing manufacturer carries up to an 18 as a matter of course, if not a 20 or 22. That means you get to express your sartorial personality any way you want. The only thing standing in your way of dressing any way you damned well please is you. I know I sound bitter but it’s so much more than that. I am sick to the back teeth of hearing women hating on their bodies. I am old enough, (and how), to know that you will look back at old pictures of yourself and despair that you wasted so many years berating yourself for how you looked, when you almost certainly look fine. Give yourself permission to wear pretty clothes today. Start working with what you’ve got today. I promise that self acceptance, no matter how many scary baby steps it takes to get there, feels so much better than self-denigration. 

(I hope, despite my ranting, I’ve conveyed to you that I do know what it’s like to feel the way you do. And, I would add the proviso that if your feelings are getting so out of hand that they’re starting to diminish the quality of your life, I would recommend you get some counselling).