One of my most troubling memories of getting dressed takes place in two locations: the guest bedroom and guest bathroom of my parents house. Well, actually, the bedroom was my sister’s former childhood bedroom, in which my mother inexplicably decided to put two extremely uncomfortable twin beds for no discernible reason.. The bathroom was the bathroom just outside my brother’s childhood bedroom, so I suppose technically it could be technically labeled My Brother’s Bathroom, but thinking of it in that way makes me feel uncomfortable about whatever it is that went on there while he was a teenager. The year I briefly occupied these two spaces was 2008 or 2009; my childhood bedroom was long gone (converted into my sister’s room to accommodate the aforementioned inexplicable twin beds in her former space), and I would never be anything but a guest in my parents house ever again, save for a brief and unfortunate period of about four months in 2014 when my boyfriend and I lived there before we both moved to New York and I became a lesbian.
Anyways, the inexplicable twin bed room and the masturbatory teen bathroom were separated by a long, carpeted hallway with wood paneling. I was a guest, and I was preparing to go out for the night with friends from my hometown. I can’t entirely recall what the trends were at the time, in terms of what I was actually getting dressed in, but it’s safe to say it involved knee-high boots, a thick belt over a top, and skinny jeans. Of course, I was a size 18 at the time, which meant the thick belt wasn’t studded or cool, but came from Lane Bryant. The jeans were jeggings, before jeggings got good and they were simply jersey leggings shittily dyed to look like jeans, and the top was from Old Navy, and the knee high boots were fine, probably.
I knew the look wasn’t exactly what my peers were dressing in at the time — how could it have been? Clothing that would make me look the same as my friends simply wasn’t available in my size, and I’d become pretty accustomed to fashioning similar-feeling outfits with whatever I could find. The effect, I imagine, was similar to setting a name-brand Barbie and a dollar store Barbie side-by-side: They both looked similar from a distance, but when you get up close you realize that one has a weird dent in her leg and mismatched eyes and feels kind of weird to touch. My entire wardrobe at that time was a dollar store Barbie.
Still, whenever I got dressed, I always tried to remain optimistic. I’d lay out my outfit on the bed, take a shower, do my skincare and makeup, wrap my hair in a towel, and calmly walk to the bedroom, ready to step into my outfit and feel good. On this particular night, I took my time getting ready, really indulging in the process of showering and blow drying and moisturizing. It was important, for me, to remain as calm as possible in the time leading up to getting dressed, if only because I knew in the back of my mind that when the clothes came on, that feeling of peace and calm would likely turn into a raging, sweaty inferno of frustration.
20 minutes later I was laying on the floor of that connecting hallway — sobbing, screaming to my friend on the phone that I wouldn’t be going out that night and in fact would never be going outside again.
___
We talk a lot about how fashion rejects fat bodies, but we don’t talk as much about how fat bodies reject clothing. It’s not a matter of intention: If you’re anything like me, there’s nothing you’d love more than a closet full of well-made clothes that feel good to touch and look good on your body. Unfortunately, that level of choice just doesn’t exist when you’re over a certain size, and what does exist is of much poorer quality than clothing available in smaller digits. This results in a lot of poor fits, itchy fabrics and shattered expectations. The cognitive dissonance between what I think an outfit will look like and what it actually looks like has been varying levels of mindfucky over the years, and it still happens today in a plus size fashion market that’s supposedly “better than it’s ever been.”
Of course, pre-2010, things were far worse. The night of the meltdown I had above is one of many, but it sticks out because of its severity, and because of how fugly the outfit was. Imagine having a psychotic episode about a pair of too-short and possibly slightly glittery navy Target jeggings that were fraying at the seams upon purchase, or shedding theatrical levels of tears because a four-inch wide dark brown belt with gold rivets looks terrible. It seems absurd now, but I know why it happened. It happened because those clothes weren’t actually made for me — they were made for a brand’s idea of a plus size consumer, and that is: someone who doesn’t need, want or deserve quality, either because their body is forever in progress (the classic “I’ll buy the nice stuff when I lose the weight”) or because they don’t actually need clothing to look good, because they will never look good, because how could a plus-size body ever look good? So here’s some trash, the afterthought of an inventory strategy, a bone to throw to make a quick buck with absolutely zero intention of making the person spending that buck feel good.
I don’t have the brainpower at this current moment to dig any deeper into why, brands? But I can definitely attest to a lifetime of my body rejecting my clothes, to having extreme and visceral reactions to the feeling of them on my body. It’s part of what makes getting dressed and being fat so complicated — it’s not just lack of options, or other people’s opinions, or even your level of self confidence. It’s also the fact that you never know when you’re going to put on a piece of clothing and actively feel it working against you. It’s the sensation of cheap fabric from a garment you know isn’t supposed to feel that way. It’s the lasting, uncomfortable imprint of a waistband that’s too tight even though it’s supposedly your size. It’s the dress that’s way too big in the chest and way too small in the hips because the sizing was poorly graded and every brand thinks fat people exist in one type of body. It’s the outfit that wasn’t what you really wanted, actually, but what you settled for because it’s what you could find. It’s the knowledge that for as long as you’re fat and want to get dressed, you run the risk of a piece of fabric becoming a mirror to your entire existence, a highlight reel of all the times you desperately wanted to present yourself a certain way but couldn’t, and itchy-ass, ass-ugly reminder that you’ve failed, or been failed, or both.
When I think about 2008 or 2009 Amanda having a world-class meltdown, sweating profusely and cursing and chain smoking out of her parent’s guest bathroom window and feeling like absolute garbage about herself, I feel for her. In fact, I still am her. Truthfully, no matter how far you get yourself at peace with getting dressed as a fat person, or how much better your closet is than it used to be, there’s always a small part of you that’s waiting to feel rejected by the very piece of clothing you worked so hard to obtain. The difference is, when that feeling comes now, it doesn’t knock me off my feet and send me into a spiral that concludes with me refusing to go to a sports bar in Cleveland with a dramatic claim that I will never emerge from one or both of my parents’ inexplicable twin beds again. Instead, I recognize that feeling as an old adversary, a frenemy who destroyed my very soul and left me sweaty and furious on countless occasions but also helped me self actualize. For me, that’s a feeling worth fighting with.