So much for having a relaxing time of it whilst I’m off work this week…I’m skidding sideways into today’s post in a very last minute dot com kind of way because I got busy this morning having a bit of a sort out and I’ve only just nicely come up for air.
I have to hold my hands up and admit that having surveyed pretty much every fashion choice I have made over the last, I dunno maybe four or five years, I need locking up and the key needs to be thrown away. Immediately.
On the face of it, I had a clear out not that long ago, and it’s not that I’ve gone down another size since then or anything exciting like that…I just had a nagging feeling that I didn’t quite do it properly the first time. I sort of scratched the surface, but I knew if I looked there would be more stuff to go through and sure enough, today I not only did a second lap of the wardrobe but I went through all my drawers and the under-the-bed storage too.
I don’t have enough fingers and toes to count all the items I’ve unearthed where I’d bought something without trying it on, in the hope that whatever I’d brought home would make me look nice, only to ball it up in disgust and shove it in the bottom of my wardrobe or the back of a drawer when it actually made me look like the back end of a bus. The thing is, what I really wanted to look was skinny. That’s what I mean when I said nice…I meant skinny. There’s no wonder nothing much lived up to my expectations.
I never try stuff on in the shop. I think my aversion to changing rooms stems right back to my teenage years where it was all the rage to have communal ones. They’d be filled with skinny girls, looking effortlessly chic in whatever they tried on, and I’d be the fat one in the corner avoiding eye contact with anyone whilst I tried to force my spare tyre into whatever I’d managed to find in size large. Please God let something fit…I just want to carry a bag that says Top Shop…
I vividly remember getting so hot and bothered that no matter how much I’d managed to tame my unruly mop of hair before hitting town with my friends, by the time I emerged from the fitting room it would be wild and curly, sitting on top of a chubby red face which would never really recover for the rest of the afternoon. It was traumatic.
I struggled to find my groove, you know? I found it really hard to carve out my style as a fat girl, and desperate as I was to follow fashion and copy the kind of looks I saw in Jackie and the other teenage mags, it was nigh-on impossible. Other than the asymmetric layering styles that I’m fairly fond of nowadays, I still think that very few people can design great clothes for fat bodies. Scaling up skinny clothes doesn’t work. And most designed-for-fat clothes tend to be created with my mother in mind.
As I see it, shopping as a fat girl is sort of a Hobson’s choice situation…it’s on that basis that I’m prepared to overlook some of the very questionable purchases I’ve made and then buried over the last few years. It wasn’t my fault m’lud. I wonder how many folk will get their garment of choice home from the charity shop when I’ve dropped this lot off in the hope that it will make them look nice, and then ball it up in disgust and shove it in a drawer…
I’ve got to say though, all in all it’s been a good day. I’m feeling really organised, I’ve got a fair number of auctions running on eBay and about ten massive bags for the charity shop. Best of all, I’ve uncovered some old friends, in fact I’m wearing a shirt right now that I’ve not been able to get into for at least three years, and that’s a good feeling 🙂
