Fat Fashion (?)

I am a person who appreciates comfortable clothes.  I'm not a haute couture kind of gal, though I enjoy watching the occasional fashion show just to see what they're trying to convince women to wear as the latest thing.  The reality is, though, that personally I'm happier in a pair of jeans and a polo shirt than just about anything else.  But when the occasion requires that I dress more fashionably than that, I try to make the effort to do so.

Unfortunately, it is pretty hard to get clothes in my size that aren't either just skinny people's clothes cut out of a lot more cloth or polyester grandma pants and muumuus.  To add to the problem, I am what is known as "a pear", which means that my upper body is about 2 sizes smaller than my lower body.  Let me tell you THAT makes it interesting when trying to buy a dress!  When the shoulders fit, it won't even go down over my hips and when the hips fit, it is practically falling off my shoulders.  Since I am not a pop culture persona (yet...but if enough people eventually follow this blog, who knows what could happen! *grin*), I really don't want to be giving the world the excitement of a wardrobe malfunction.  Thus I do a lot of separates, so that I can buy things in the appropriate sizes.

I am about to embark upon a clothes purchasing bout as I have pants that are so old that the elastic isn't stretchy any more, shirts that have holes worn through them, and have managed to get some kind of stain on nearly every item that I own.  Most of these come with interesting stories, my favorite being the combination of joint compound and three different colors of paint that have permanently discolored a formerly white shirt because I was up to my elbows in the mixture making "stones" for a friend's haunted house.  But stories or not, I need to have clothing that is presentable and able to be worn in public without me wanting to start explaining WHY the stains on my shirt are so cool.

This means, of course, that I am about to get both depressed and angry as I search for something that will fit me, before resorting to purchasing some things from the Roamans and Lane Bryant catalogs, like I always do.  Before I do so, however, I would like to say a few things to the so-called designers who come up with Fat Superhero clothing:

• Not all Fat Superheroes are big breasted.  I know that it is a thing, that comic books always show female superheroes with size ZZ boobies perkily peeking out of some form of no-real-support bustier thingamajig, but the reality is that, like most women, we come in assorted shapes and sizes.  There ARE fat Superheroes who wear A and B cups.  It would be nice if we could find bras too.
• It would also be nice if we could find shirts that didn't assume that if our hips are big, then our breasts are big too.  Personally, I welcomed the whole 'babydoll shirt' style, because it meant that I could FINALLY get tops that fit my breasts AND my hips!
• Taking a design created for a smaller size and simply adding material does not guarantee a flattering garment.  Yeah, it works for some, but not all.  The designer who figures out that they can actually design clothes specifically for Fat Superheroes is going to become rich.  We want flattering clothes too, and when someone finally starts marketing clothing that fits our proportions and isn't just small clothes made big, we will take ourselves and our many, many dollars to them, and we will be pretty darned loyal to them as long as they continue to put out quality product.  Remember, fashion world, there are more of us than there are of the supermodel sizes!
• I would like to find the person who decided that Fat Superheroes want every top to have short sleeves or to be sleeveless and beat them into a state of physical insensibility that matches their apparent state of mental insensibility.  Sure, I wear tank tops and t-shirts, but I really prefer a 3/4 length sleeve because otherwise my water wings catch the wind every time that it blows and I end up doing a Mary Poppins impression until the wind gives out and I land on some unsuspecting stranger's lawn with a thump!  So please, give us some options with sleeves, too?  Especially on formalwear!  There are some beautiful dresses out there, but I really find it difficult to clutch a shawl around my shoulders for the entirety of my friend's wedding buffet.  The little tassels tend to dunk themselves into the meatballs and sauce on a regular basis.
• Lastly, please remember when you make your jeans, that just because I'm Fat, that doesn't mean I don't have a waist.  I can't tell you the number of pairs of jeans I've owned where the hips fit, and then an entire bolt of material had to be gathered around my waist with my belt, or I had to take scissors, needle, and thread to them to put darts in so that my pants actually stayed up.  I'm not one of those gangsta wannabes who runs around with my underwear showing on purpose (though I have some darned cute undies, thank you very much!).  Would it be too much to ask that my jeans have a waist that fits and hips that are roomy enough for me to sit without wincing?

So, those of you clothing manufacturers who deign to carry larger sizes, do yourselves a favor and start asking your customers what they really want out of their clothes.  After you do that, GIVE them what they're asking for.  I suspect that you will be pleasantly surprised at the outcome.

Oh, and by the way, those of you who make clothing for our taller sisters, you may want to do the same thing.  I suspect that a lot of the things that bother my fellow fatties and myself also bother the tall gals.

Lastly,  stop charging me ten times the price for my clothes.  I know that there's extra material, but really, the amount of material you're using in my clothing does NOT justify the price difference between what I'm buying and what someone who wears a size 10 is buying.  And the price difference certainly isn't due to extra design and development costs!  Just give me quality clothes that fit me well at a reasonable price, and I'll be yours forever.

As for right now, I think I'm just going to get two new pair of jeans, and a polo in every color that Roamans offers them in.  Oh, and possibly that cute little lingerie set.  My hubby deserves a little treat.  *grin*