What Do You Dial For the Fashion Police?

Ah, spring, when a young(ish) Twins fan's fancy lightly turns to thoughts of finding some capri pants and maybe a top to go with her so-cute new sandals.

You know what? They don't make clothes for actual women anymore. TBL is not sure they ever did.

TBL recalls being fourteen and approximately as wide as your pinkie finger and having no problems at all finding clothes that fit just wonderfully. But TBL kept on getting older until one day she woke up and had hips and a butt and other things that grown women have in real life. And suddenly, the shopping? Not so easy.

Here's the thing: the average American woman is 5'4" and wears a size 14. TBL is 5'3" and does not wear a size 14, but neither does she wear a size 2. And yet, all the pants which fit the curvy bits have great swathes of extra fabric flapping about the legs and/or pooling about the ankles. And all the tops which fit the curvy bits either drape tentlike over the rest of the torso or look as though they were applied with a vacuum-sealing device of some sort.

As a bit of an aside, while TBL is pleased to see the sport clothing manufacturers producing more gear for the female baseball fan, far too much of it is pink. Those of you who know TBL in real life, take a minute to picture her in pink. Try not to laugh so hard you injure yourself, please. This blog does not carry liability insurance.

But back to the fashion industry--TBL has female friends in every size you can imagine, and we all find that the task of acquiring clothes that fit nicely and are appropriate to both our personalities and our ages falls somewhere between "Herculean" and "Sisyphean".

So tell us, why are 95% of the clothes in the stores made for only two kinds of women--the pencil-thin, hipless, buttless, boobless wonder, or your color-blind Auntie Edna who thinks muumuus are appropriate to every occasion?

Most women fall somewhere between the two. And what we want is not so terribly complicated. We want clothes that fit. Comfortably. Over real bodies. We want to be able to look professional without looking frumpy. We want to be casual but still have waists that are easily identifiable. We want to look (and feel) sexy, not trashy.

We want to walk into stores and try things on without having our self-esteem bludgeoned to bits. It's okay--it's normal--for a woman have a convex belly and dimples on her thighs. Why should she hide under floral-print tents just because she doesn't spend three hours a day at the gym or--goddess forbid--she had a baby and her body changed? Why are we made to feel ashamed of having a woman's body, not a boy's? Perhaps more to the point, why do we allow ourselves to be shamed?

But no matter how good (or otherwise) we feel about our bodies, hardly anyone is making decent clothes for them. We do the best we can, we hunt through store after store, picking up this here and that there and too often settling for something vaguely adequate because it's the best we can find. We learn to alter our own clothing (get a serger, ladies, you'll love it) and keep an eye out for our best girlfriends' sizes while we're in the stores, because they do the same for us and we can all use every bit of help we can get.

We buy stuff that isn't comfortable because it looks okay, and stuff that looks like hell because it's comfortable. We come home with things that neither look nor feel good, because we think they might be great when they soften up in the wash, or after we drop that five pounds we've been meaning to deal with. We end up with closets bursting and drawers overflowing and nothing to wear.

Guys? You wonder why she has so many clothes? This is why.

It's stupid. Piles and mountains and racks of clothes in store after store all over the world, and no one who isn't a size 4 and under can find a thing that they really like. Who designs this crap?

Who decided that TBL is too short for her own hips, and that if she doesn't want to wear a sack over her chest, she must be determined to skirt the very edges of the public decency laws? Who decided that the most gorgeous, sexy women TBL has ever met should disappear under yards of shapeless fabric just because they had children? Who decided that you only deserve nice clothes if you're 5'8" and measure 34-22-34?

And, ladies, we can't hang this one on the guys. TBL is certain that there are, in fact, men out there who honestly prefer the stick-figure vision of femininity, but she has yet to become acquainted with any of them. The (straight) guys, they do like the curvy bits.

You know what the really "in" thing is this summer? The empire waist. That's where the top or dress is cinched (usually with a band of some sort) directly under the breasts and flows loosely from there. This style looks delicate and lovely on any woman who has an A cup and no hips. On the rest of us--which is most of us--it looks like maternity wear.

And to judge from what is available in the stores, they all expect TBL to voluntarily buy this stuff and spend the summer looking pregnant. Aside from the fact that FPC would fall catatonic at the mere thought of becoming a grandmother, TBL does not wish to spend her summer explaining that no, she does not want or need a used stroller for cheap.

You will not find any answers here. TBL is just venting, and putting some questions out there. And maybe hoping that if enough of us think about this, and get annoyed about this, and find a way to stop buying crap that's barely serviceable and mostly undesirable, someone in the fashion industry will wake up and say, "Excuse me, but why don't we try something completely off the wall here, and whip up some clothes that make people look and feel good? I've got a hunch they might sell."

And if, in the course of your daily life, you should stumble across some capris which would actually be capri-length and not wader-length on a woman of normal height, and which do not in any way resemble a hot air balloon or, alternatively, body paint, do drop TBL a line. She's still looking...