Designer Dilemmas

Unless you’re fifteen years old, weigh 84 pounds and have the profile of a poultry skewer, shopping for clothing nowadays can be a traumatic experience. This is expecially true for someone like me, because I bitterly resent patronizing any store where the salesgirls are better dressed than I am.

I don’t think designers have taken a good look at the female figure since the Boxer Rebellion. Last year they designed clothing for midgets and ten-year-old boys, but not for women—at least not any women I know—the ones with two arms and legs and a reasonable amount of avoirdupois in between. I know someone who didn’t buy a thing all year because she refused to appear in public looking like a pregnant eight-year-old.

Now, fashion’s fickle pendulum has swung completely in the opposite direction. This year they’ve buried legs behind hobbling swathes of skirt which add ten years per ugly inch to your age, and topped it all off with shoes just like the oxfords Grandma wore back in 1902.

Women even have trouble buying maternity clothes. Fifteen years ago, everything was size twenty, black, and designed for forty-year-old women, which the manufacturers obviously felt was the proper age for anyone contemplating such a serious undertaking as having a baby.

Today, they’ve undergone a change of heart. They now apparently feel that no one over fourteen could possibly attract a man long enough to become pregnant in the first place. Therefore all maternity clothes are size five and ten inches above the knee, which is ridiculous, because none of the pregnant women I know could squeeze into anything smaller than an army tent, and then only if it slept six.

Things don’t improve a bit when you give birth. After starving myself into a size ten (well, maybe a twelve, but a small twelve), I still can’t find anything to wear that doesn’t make me look under ten or over sixty years old. The colours are unflattering, the materials are sleazy, the trimmings are grotesque and everything is beaded or fringed.

There’s only one solution. I’m going to drag out all the clothes I bought sixteen years ago on my honeymoon that I’ve been saving for the kids for Hallowe’en. After I lose twenty pounds so I can get into them, I’m going to be the best-dressed woman in town.