What Not To Wear

Clothes make the man. Naked people have little or no influence on society. Mark Twain

Have you ever watched What Not to Wear? You know, the show where fashion gurus Stacy and Clinton bring some poorly-dressed slob to New York and give them a credit card, a set of fashion rules to shop by and a hair/cosmetic makeover. Some of the transformations are amazing, and the subjects end up feeling one hundred percent better about themselves.

The premise is that no matter your shape or size, you can look good in the right clothes – ‘good’ meaning taller and slimmer, closer to the image pushed at us by the advertising industry. An image most of us can never match. That’s the whole point. As women, so much of our self-esteem is based on appearance, on trying to reach the accepted ideal of what’s “beautiful”. Most of us never stop to think about how transitory that definition is.

In the final semester of my BSc, I needed to find an elective course. I had a choice between metabolic endocrinology and a ‘History of Clothing’ course from the Home Ec department. No-brainer. The clothing course sounded like a refreshing change from my Ag Science program, and it had to be a breeze.

A refreshing change, yes, but easy? No. We wrote a lot of papers which were graded severely, but I loved it, and that course had quite an effect on my self-esteem.

I’m four foot eleven, but I have the bone structure to be about five foot six, like my mother. I started sewing at thirteen because I couldn’t find clothes that fit. Not the best boost for a young girl’s body image. But as I learned about the standards of beauty at different periods in history, I realized that the ideal of my time – tall, thin and blonde – was a recent thing, dating from the nineteen twenties. I wasn’t distressingly stocky, I was Rubenesque. My thick dark hair would have been the envy of any Victorian miss. The day I stood in a one hundred and fifty year old gown and IT FIT (or would have if I’d been wearing a corset) was the day I understood that I was, in fact, beautiful. No one else in the class could come anywhere near that dress.

Now, I’m comfortable enough in my skin to appreciate my body as it is. Yes, I’d like to be a little thinner, and I’m working on it. Most importantly, I want to be healthy. And I want to surround myself with people who appreciate me for who and what I am and don’t measure me by my measurements.