panic! at the dressing room

a few memories from a lifetime of dressing room meltdowns, including one involving leonine Italian model Fabio.

I’ve always found it funny that dressing rooms are called dressing rooms when so many things that happen inside have absolutely nothing to do with getting dressed. On paper, the utility of the space certainly lends itself to the name — it’s a private, lit room (never well lit in my experience, just lit to varying degrees of bad) to take off your current clothes and get dressed in other clothes with the intention of possibly buying more clothes. But based on the experiences I’ve had in dressing rooms, there are names that would suit it much better. A dissociation room, perhaps. A chamber of inadequacy. A consternation corral. A panic room, but with less Jodie Foster — or, if you’re a lesbian like me, more Jodie Foster. 

I always sensed that dressing rooms were dark places, even at a young age. At nine, knowing my chubby limbs would soon be exasperatedly stuffed into a pair of elasticated boy’s jeans my dad found at a department store, I hid in the center of a circular clothing rack nearby, hoping my dad would simply forget I ever existed. After about five minutes of hugging my knees to my chest and planning my new life, I recalled an episode of 20/20 I’d seen my parents watching that involved a child being abducted from a department store. I realized  my impulse decision could have unintended consequences, and thus made the brave choice to reenter society, even if it meant I’d have to go straight to the dressing room as penance. I poked my head out, and there was Fabio — the Fabio — standing there, holding a bottle of the Versace-backed Mediterraneum fragrance he was hired to endorse. He looked down at me and smiled. I panicked and retreated back into the clothing rack, wondering if he’d try and tell someone about the fat child in glasses he spotted peeking at him from a rack full of Dockers. As far as I know, Fabio never said a word, not to any store employee nor to the legion of horny Cleveland housewives foaming at the mouth five feet away, boxes of Mediterraneum in hand to be autographed. My dad found me eventually, and when I confessed I’d attempted to start a new life in a clothing rack until Fabio smiled at me, he said “O...k…” in a way that let me know it was probably unwise to repeat the story if I wanted anyone to think I was sane. Until now, it’s been Fabio and my little secret. I also recently learned that Versace allegedly never paid Fabio for that campaign, which is galling considering it included a tour of Rust Belt department stores.

But back to the dressing room. Another unfond memory I have is sitting on the dressing room bench with my head in my hands at 12, knowing my mom was desperately searching the racks of the misses section for clothing that would A) not make me look like a sensible middle-aged person and B) actually fit me. At my size and height it was a nearly impossible task. Waiting for her in the dressing room wasn’t just about waiting for clothing — I was waiting for an armful of reminders that I was different from my peers who got to shop at  Limited Too and Delia’s. They looked like the 12-year-olds we saw on TV, and I looked like a gentle librarian from western Pennsylvania who collected Longaberger baskets. Incidentally, gentle, Longaberger-collecting western Pennsylvania librarian is an ideal aesthetic at 37 — but at 12, the clothing that was accessible to me felt like social suicide in the form of a khaki front pleat, and whatever came to me in the dressing room felt like the beginning of the end. When my mom finally arrived at the door with whatever combination of slacks she could find, I was usually mid anxiety spiral, and despite her earnest attempts to approach the situation from a practical place, it almost always ended with me having a meltdown, sobbing and wading through a pile of rejects and going limp on the floor until my mom had a meltdown, too.

As I got a bit older and started shopping with friends, the dressing room experience didn’t get much better. I was petrified of my friends knowing what size I was, so on the rare occasion the store actually carried a 14/16, I’d go out of my way to hide it — sometimes, in stores that used plastic size markers on their hangers, I’d desperately try to swap the 14/16 hanger for something smaller. I never shared a dressing room with friends, and when I was solo, I hardly tried on any clothing at all, preferring to stay inside and pretend like I was while quietly panicking.

“Amanda, did you try on that dress with the black lace?” My friend asked me through the wall.

“Yeah, it’s not what I thought it was, honestly,” I lied, shuffling around so it would sound like I was trying it on. “It’s like, ugly,” I lied again, knowing it was the cutest dress I’d ever seen in my short life but that there was also no way I was fitting into it and would privately cry about it when I got home. 

For as shitty as it was when a store didn’t have my size, it was almost as bad when, sometimes, it did. If I did manage to make it to the dressing room and put on something that fit, the feeling of relief was so overwhelming and immediate that I didn’t stop to consider if I actually liked it. I bought my prom dress that way — my mom took me to a fancy bridal and events shop she knew carried plus sizes, and I tried on a massive black and white tulle confection that was a stylistic departure from anything I’d ever wanted to wear or would wear again. The skirt zipped, and I lied and said I couldn’t live without it. My mom asked me if I was sure, since it was $250 and far outside her budget. Sweating and nervous, I confirmed without telling her that the simple fact that it fit meant that I was as sure as I could ever be. On prom night, I didn’t feel beautiful, but I did feel like I was wearing a prom dress, which is something I wasn’t sure would be possible. At the time, just having it fastened to my body and not cutting off my circulation was enough. 

I have so many dressing room stories like the ones above, too many for one newsletter. In fact, I sometimes think about how the entire impetus for the kind of writing I do spawned from a broken down department store dressing room, an entire body of work spiritually linked to a handful of square feet in which I’ve had some of my most emotionally severe experiences. In many ways, the dressing room is the beginning of every story about being fat and getting dressed, the setting for every formative negative thought about my own body, the place to get dressed while dressing myself down, the fiery threshold of what I’ve come to know as fat hell.