Re: Do you speak Fashion?

On Wed, 27 Jun 2007 15:37:56 GMT, djheydt@xxxxxxxxxxx (Dorothy J
Heydt) seems to have said:

In article <1i0cwiq.htfxgl128h1s2N%green_knight@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
Catja Pafort <green_knight@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Dorothy J Heydt wrote:

I've told before of the time Hal went into the local Big and Tall
shop to buy some shirts, and I noticed that they had a ladies'
department, and went and looked at it.

There were many garments there that would've fitted me, none of
which I'd be caught dead in. The manufacturers, the shop
managers, and possibly even their general run of customers seem
to've subscribed to the idea that if you weighed 250 pounds that
was a GOOD thing and you should FLAUNT it by wearing purple and
gold and sequins.

I suppose they frequent that shop because every other shop suggests that
if you weigh 250 pounds you ought to dress in black tents, or maybe a
nice unobtrusive maroon; that with a certain dress size your delight in
bright colours and adornments has to vanish.

If you HAVE a delight in bright colors and adornments. I don't.

And I like it that someone, somewhere, caters for both ends of the
spectrum.

Yes, that's a great idea in principle. But I haven't found a
place that caters to *my* end of the spectrum. My daughter took
me off to Lane Bryant's recently, and actually managed to find me
a pair of grey slacks and a sort of jacket-thing (but merely
waist-length) in black; but virtually everything else in the
store was in the purple-gold-and-sequins category. Tastes do
differ, and mine sure differed from theirs. I don't think
rhinestones on blue jeans are a good thing even on the skinny,
and across a 56" backside they're just WRONG.


Currently, there's a lamentable trend in fashion to be kind of tawdry
and tarty. It's unfortunate, because even clothes that would be
handsome are made less graceful in this spirit. You have the perfect
pullover -- but its neckline plunges to the navel, and its hem rides
just too high to meet the waistband of your pants. You're looking for
a plain shirt, and all the t-shirts have those plunging necklines and
also rhinestones and clever sayings like "99% angel" or "I'm mean to
boys."

Or you go through rack after rack of baby doll shirts clearly meant to
cater to the man or woman who has a fetishistic attraction to pregnant
women (that is, the shirts make every woman look pregnant, and also
they are cut low up top and high down on the bottom, and frequently
they also have the bra-showing straps and armholes so popular amongst
high school students, and sometimes they even have slits in the
fluttery part -- sometimes those slits are even graceful, because fo
the way they make the fluttery part flutter, but usually they're
undermined by the rest of the garment's details).

Then the fabrics they're made of seem to be chosen for their
sleaziness -- in the strict sense of the word as well as the extended
sense. The kind of lace you buy in great lots for small children to
play with: cloth that looks worn out, and not just the inexplicable
and environmentally disastrous "stone-washed" denim: also the material
for those unfortunate baby dolls and things that approximate real
shirts but they don't have enough buttons and they have awkward
sleeves with great ungainly cuffs right at the thickest paert of the
forearm so we can all look like we're Popeye and trying to hide it.
Things are pre-faded and pre-stained with a strange grey-brown die.

This is the large size section: the regular sizes have all this, but
they also have reasonable clothing, the same old stuff they've always
had, and some truly sweet pieces that pay some kind of lip service to
the weird fashions but have grace to them, and decent fabrics.

Those, I can buy for my daughter. Me, I just have to hunt
compulsively -- or I could pay lots and lots of money I don't have to
be dressed decently.

Notice I'm not saying that no clothes should be revealing. I'm
complaining that the choices available to me are too often ungainly
and ugly. If they were too often too revealing for me, but they were
pretty, I'd be saying, "these clothes are nice, but where are the
clothes for me?"

Lucy Kemnitzer
still


.