the high stakes of low rise pt. 2

when it comes to getting dressed, what do fat people actually deserve?

For many years, the consensus was that if you were over a certain size, the highest ambition your closet could aspire to was a modest rack of tunic length tops, crepey skirts, whichever ill-fitting men’s carpenter pants you managed to find to fit you and a cardigan, just in case you found yourself in a situation where your arms needed to be emergently covered, like at the pool in 100 degree heat.

In 1996 for example, I wore a woman’s hot pink stirrup leg knit suit set for school picture day, the sort of business casual outfit otherwise seen on feisty middle-aged real estate agents named Sue who drank Shiraz and drove Ford Taurus station wagons and were described by their colleagues as a real firecracker. I was 11 and regularly wrote impassioned missives to the tooth fairy begging her to leave a live rabbit under my pillow, and yet there I was, dressed in the same thing as the Sues. 

In college, I skulked around in a pair of GAP men’s wide leg jeans for so long, they started to smell like dead skin no matter how many times I washed them. In 2010, while my thin friends tried their hands and hip bones at low rise Abercrombie & Fitch jeans with two-inch zippers, I wore a ditsy floral tunic I panic-purchased at Lane Bryant, terrified someone I knew would see me at the register. None of it made me feel good, and none of it actually looked good — but I was fat, so that’s what I thought I deserved. 

A handful of years later, sentiments around what fat people deserve to wear started to change. Plus size bloggers emerged. Brands started quietly offering a limited amount of inventory in extended sizes. Social media came into play, providing a vector for fat people to find other fat people who were interested in clothing. At some point a sociopath in marketing and advertising’s deepest, dankest hellpit realized they could make an absolute fucking killing by telling fat people actually, yes, they do deserve clothing. Whether or not fashion brands actually made that clothing, and made it well, didn’t actually matter. As long as a brand was espousing the good word of body positivity and “celebrating yourself at any size,” it was able to position itself as a noble warrior in the fight against exclusivity and fatphobia, getting attention and accolades in the process.

We — and by we, I mean fat people online and/or interested in fashion, myself included — helped. I worked as a fashion writer at the exact time as the rise of “inclusive” marketing, and I often documented the industry’s frantic attempts to sell something, anything, that would knight them with a headline about “making waves” or “revolutionizing the industry.” Designers sent their first size 14 down a runway,  and I wrote stories about that designer “changing the game.” A brand extended their sizing (usually to a 20 or 22, and usually a fraction of their overall inventory), and fashion media peppered the internet with headlines about how that brand was bravely “moving the needle forward” as if a lavender peplum dress in a size 20 was somehow changing the course of human history.

In my experience at that time, there was no room for criticism or negativity in this era of social media and “inclusive” fashion. On the occasion I wrote about anyone, or anything I thought questionable or worthy of critique, I got feedback and comments chastising me for my “negativity.”I was regularly admonished by strangers on the internet for what they perceived to be me shitting all over “baby steps in fashion’s journey towards inclusivity.” Once, I wrote a blog post questioning why Lane Bryant only used models with hourglass body types — for several demented reasons, that post went viral and was picked up by dozens of news outlets. As a result, a well-known fat influencer /activist publicly scolded me for not understanding how important it was that we as a society clap for Lane Bryant and “celebrate these baby steps” and “chose feminism” as if Lane Bryant was her best friend from high school drama club and not a multi-million dollar brand that made sparkly trousers for fat women. 

Anyways, there is a time to unpack the hypocrisy and complicity of fat influencers within the landscape of fat fashion, but that time is not now — I’ve already gotten far enough off track. All that matters is this: During the rise of plus size influencing and body positive marketing and brands expanding to accommodate fat shoppers, it felt like we were supposed to celebrate every paltry, cheap offering from any brand who’d finally decided to include us — every campaign with visible fat rolls, every size 16 on a runway, every fat influencer who partnered a major retailer, everything. All of those moments were “baby steps,” tiny incremental changes that were supposed to lead to a more equitable fashion landscape, one that gave fat people the clothes they actually deserved. 

And yet, here we are, roughly seven years later, and I’m not sure we’ve gotten what we thought they were telling us we deserve. In fact, lately, it’s felt that what we deserve has somehow taken a back seat to what we were told to expect all those years ago: shitty, limited options to shop for, limited representation on runways, a subtle, horrifying slide back into diet culture — including some of the most successful body positive influencers participating in misleading campaigns for diet pills. It’s as if the momentum created over the last seven years has almost slowed to a halt, and possibly even showed signs of throwing itself in reverse. 

And for me, one of the most glaring signs of this regression is the return of a trend like low rise jeans. Something we once laid to rest as a relic of a fatphobic era in fashion has been dusted off, repackaged, and resold. That’s not really surprising; fashion tends to operate in 20 year cycles. What is surprising, though, is the pace at which plus size media and fat content creators are urging their audiences to participate in a trend that has caused us so much collective trauma. The impulse to justify fat people’s participation in low rise jeans doesn’t just feel like an earnest encouragement to take a risk on a trend — given the context and the current culture, it feels like a backslide into a desperate attempt at conformity. Making the argument that low rise jeans for fat people are a good thing feels like a subtle surrender, an exhausted, heavy sigh and weary “I guess we’re doing this. Again.” 

I know, I know — they’re fucking jeans. It’s not that deep. For me, though (and maybe even you, hence why you’re reading this), it is that deep. In fact, I’d say that clothing and getting dressed is one of the most palatial caverns in the vast cave system of my trauma, a damp, acrid chamber where you’ll find some of my biggest demons (and, occasionally, a pretty little geode or two). It’s not the clothing itself that feels so emotionally resonant, though — it’s the act of getting dressed, something I’ve had to do every day, for my entire life, in a world that in explicit and subtle ways tells me I don’t deserve it. In other words, a fat hell of someone else’s creation. 

So no, I don’t think low rise jeans for fat people are a good thing, actually. I don’t think we should be excited to wear them, nor do I think we should allow such obvious cultural backsliding trick us yet again into making an appalling, impractical trend designed for thin people make sense on our bodies, simply for the sake of being a “part of the conversation.” That conversation, the one we’ve been trying to have for seven years now, needs to end. It’s time for a new conversation, I think. One we actually deserve.