Women’s Fashion

So, turns out I’ve been wearing the wrong bra size my whole life.  According to one acquaintance this is…

“Alright!  It’s a right of passage for all women of a certain age to discover that everything they’ve known about themselves is wrong!”

According to another, I’m…

“A total muppet.”

Go figure.

Combined with these bra-based revelations, at the time of writing this post, summer has briefly come to London.  I hate the cliche that the English embrace regarding our obsession with the weather, but even I will admit that I was getting bored of the thick, cold, pouring rain which has defined our climate since April.  However, for a few brief, glorious hours, London strips off, goes to the park, lounges on benches, eats ice creams and generally does its best to get that vague loss-of-greyness that counts for an English tan.  And us girls get out the frocks.  And here’s the thing… I hate women’s fashion.

It’s not the wearing of pretty clothes that I despise.  Like most women, I find the idea of appearing attractive to others, of walking with my head held high, very pleasant.  The first time I wore my first ever dress, purchased aged 21 with a cry of ‘my god, there is a world beyond tatty jeans!’ I was absolutely thrilled to have an imam approach me to explain the nature of reality, a Turkish gentleman come up and ask me if I’d have lunch with him, and a Colombian invite me home to meet his mother.  (All these offers were tactfully declined.)  As someone who has striven my whole life to exude a sort of harmless greyness wherever I go and not draw too much attention, the experience was both exciting and novel.

But here’s the thing – like everyone else, I want to conform with society’s expectations and wear pretty clothes that make me appear attractive to others, and in summer in particular I am happy to go along with the notion that this involves bare shoulders, bare shins and quite possibly a tactful suggestion of cleavage.  (Why a tactful suggestion of cleavage is something society expects is a whole other can of worms, one which I will open in a different rant.)  But what I cannot abide, is how uncomfortable so much of female fashion seems to be.

Shoes are an excellent example.  While I understand pretty dresses… sorta… the notion of getting excited by shoes is something I will never comprehend.  I’m a great over-sized gangly thing as it is, so walking in high heels seems like a dual invitation to drive my skull into doorframes or end up with my nose on the floor.  Wearing ‘pretty’ shoes despite getting blisters from the hard, elegant lines seems absurd; or wearing shoes which prevent you running for the bus, or limit your average walking speed to two miles an hour and your operational radius to about 50 yards before your feet begin to hurt.  Shoes you wobble in, shoes you fall down in, shoes you are perpetually conscious of as a thing which need to be actively managed if you’re going to move, or have to protect, somehow, from scuff and wear – it just seems ridiculous!

Then there’s tight skirts, which either suffocate you at the knee or the bum and make the afore-mentioned vital exercise of running for the bus, near impossible.  Tiny dresses which don’t merely suggest buttock, but package, compress and put a ribbon on buttocks with a cry of ‘examine me’ as if the eye could go anywhere else; and even if you’re a fan of the on-display-behind, something else I’ve never truly grasped about the tiny dress is just how frickin’ cold women are expected to get while wearing them.  Heading out to a party in winter, for example, I’ll do my duty (and by why is it my duty?!) and put on a pretty dress but if you think I’m going more than five yards without a wooly jumper, hat, scarf and winter coat when the temperature is -5 and the frost is thick upon the ground, and you have another thing coming – yet women’s fashion seems to demand that under these circumstances we go elegant and frost-bitten.

Then there’s breasts.  And leaving aside again the question of whether it’s really very groovy that society cheers for fashions that put them on display, what I really object to about so much of female fashion is the assumption that a) they should be such a prominent feature and b) that liberal bouncing is your friend.  A colleague, when asked to sum up the movie of Thor, explained, “It was a movie for boys!  I thought it was all about the guy taking his shirt off, but he didn’t at all, and then there were all these slow-motion running shots and the girl’s t-shirt was clingy, and she was not wearing a bra, and that made me sad.”  For those reading this blog who haven’t head the pleasure of experiencing this – bouncing is annoying.  If I’m about to walk five miles while carrying this week’s reading list and the ingredients of chicken risotto, the last thing I need is a distraction just below my chin.

Fashion offers a wide range of solutions to the perpetual revealing-yet-not-obscene breast problem, most of which are themselves absurd.  The return, for example, of corsetry is something that rings small bells of alarm in the back of my mind.  Sure, I can get why people are interested in wearing a corset every now and then, it’s potentially very shapely and that could be groovy; however, as someone who has served my time as a dresser on several shows where all the women wore corsets, and witnessed two actresses nearly faint from the effort, I find myself going ‘is this really a good idea’?  Corsets were, for hundreds of years, a symbol of female oppression, and sure, if we in the twenty first century can reclaim them as a sign of emancipation then good on us, but I’m not convinced we’ve really achieved that.  The idea of clothes which require continual concentration, horrifies me; from long gowns that you have to carry hitched perpetually if you want to avoid tide marks around the hem and tears from going up stairs, through to elaborate button-and-strap concoctions that cling to your upper body like libidinous friends, and whose wearers always seem to have a look in the corner of their eye that to me reads as, ‘oh god… did something just go ‘pop’?’

All this said, I imagine that men’s fashion too can be rather unrelenting, in its own way.  Witness the boys at the bus stop, wearing at least four layers of branded sporty clothes come rain or shine, and who in the shine must just be sweating like pigs beneath it all.  Witness facial hair, which I suspect could become a burden to men who let it, or the tie, as stupid a piece of floppy silk as ever society tried to throttle itself with.  But there arguably is the very, very worst part of fashion – of all fashion – summed up.  We, the discerning public, let it be a burden to us.  Which seems the most absurd thing of all.