Tuesday, December 1, 2009

Fashion flaws

by Anna Jones Buttimore

It's my day to blog, but I don't have time to write anything well thought out or carefully composed. I've been in London all day at my work's Christmas dinner (very nice it was too) and just got home twenty-minutes ago. In half-an-hour I have to drive Hubby Dearest to Heathrow airport for his next visit to Azerbaijan.

I actually finished reading Lynn Gardner's novel Pursued on the train on the way home, but I'll have to blog my review some other time. Instead, today, I will just comment on something which is annoying me at the moment. And that is fashion.

One of the perks of being a woman, I have always felt, is having a waist which is (just about) smaller than my hips. The advantage of this is that when I wear a skirt fastened about my waist I don't need a belt. It can't fall down, because it wouldn't fit over my hips. Years ago, the same was true of trousers. I have a lovely pair of stonewashed jeans which buttoned around the vicinity of my navel, and served very well at holding in my ample stomach. Teamed with a hip-length t-shirt it was about the most comfortable and flattering combo I owned.

Now, however, the fashion is for trousers which do up around the hips. This means that they have to be worn with a belt - pulled uncomfortably tight - or they will, with very little encouragement, come adrift. Not only that, but they are perfectly positioned for my ample stomach to spill contentedly over the top. And my hip-length t-shirt now leaves exactly an inch of unpalatable midriff flab on display.

In the interests of modesty, can I ask why we have to follow this horrible fashion, and why it is now impossible to buy trousers which come up to the waist? And I need to find out who decided that hipsters (with the possibility of underwear showing over the top - wow!) were a good idea and throttle them.

OK, getting back off my high horse now and driving halfway round the M25.

5 comments:

Stephanie Black said...

Amen, Anna! Just what I don't need is a pair of jeans that cut me right across my flabby abdomen.

At least some jeans companies here are catching on to the fact that not all women like low-rise jeans, and you can find some more comfortable jeans that are higher-waisted.

Valerie Holladay said...

My thoughts exactly! Fashion seems to be designed for the abnormal, not the normal woman, and for skinny teens, which I was for only a very brief time (and even had a pair of "hip-huggers," so that means it only took 30-something years to come in fashion again).

And thanks for your comment on my blog. I wondered if you'd heard of this zoo or man, and wondered if you'd think the book was as well written as I did. Or if I was just swayed but the author's British accent :-)

Jennie said...

I'm long waisted so I like mid-risers, but I detest low-rise jeans and skirts. They don't look good on any woman. Every woman who wears them, even the skinny types, look fat or pregnant in the darn things. And don't get me started on short shirts and blouses. Why would anyone want a belly hanging out? I once liked to shop, but now it's a demoralizing ordeal. Dresses hit mid thigh or drag on the ground, pants miss the waistline by several inches, and shirts are too skimpy at one or both ends. I'm beginning to think the fashion industry has been taken over by idiots who don't have a clue what women's shapes are like or it's a conspiracy to trivialize the IQs of the female gender.

Jeri Gilchrist said...

Oh Boy do I ever agree with this blog, Anna! I HATE to clothes shop. I can never find exactly what I feel comfortable in.
I don't know how to sew so that doesn't help matters either. At best I can use duct tape and a glue gun. Of course with some of the crazy things I have seen in today's fashion, maybe I could get a way with that? LOL. J/k

Gale Sears said...

Soooo funny, Anna!
Thank you for sharing and for giving me the opportunity to laugh out loud. George asked me what I was laughing about and I said, "Oh, it's a girl thing, you wouldn't understand."