In which, inspired by madrun, I make a real post for once....

My friend both online and IRL, madrun made a friends-locked post recently about clothing and fashion sense and stuff and it got me thinking about my own fashion sense issues.

I've never been a high-fashion kind of girl. Even in my adolescent years, when everybody is supposed to be so fashion-conscious, I was a jeans, t-shirt, and sneakers girl, dressing up only for church or special occasions. Don't get me wrong, I knew how to rock it when I dressed up. I bought dressy clothes that accentuated the hourglass figure I had at the time and am working on having again, and wore my hair in attractive, sometimes elegant, sometimes sexy styles. (No daughter of my mother could grow up and not learn how to dress. Hell, any son my mother might ever have had would have known how to dress.)

But of late, since I've been home a lot and not working any more, I've become very slack about my clothing. These days I dress purely for my personal comfort with little regard to appearance, except that I still care that my top not clash with my bottoms. I mostly wear t-shirts and sweats or capris, depending on the weather.

I'm working on losing weight, and as I lose weight, I'm going to have to replace my clothes as they become too loose for me. I've been trying to figure out how to dress as I lose weight and (hopefully) get back to my goal size. I don't care really how much I weigh, but I'd like the dress size to be a 10-12 again. Any smaller than that is too skinny on big ol' tall me. The last time I wore that dress size, I weighed 165 lbs, but if the number on the scale won't break 170, oh freaking well, as long as the number in the dressing room is a 10-12 dress, 12-14 jeans.

I'm thinking of trying to rock a somewhat retro look. At my slimmest, I'm still on the statuesque side of things. (My skinniest adult measurements were 36C-27-39, and that was me going to the gym three times a week, trucking around college with 50 lbs of books on my back, and going out dancing more weekend nights than not.) So modern fashions aren't really designed for my figure.

So fuck modern fashions. I'll just go for the much prettier, much more feminine looks of the '40s and '50s, when it was fashionable for a woman to look like an adult woman (aka T&A, or B&T for my British friends).

Finding actual retro fashions that will fit my tall self is probably a problem, because women just were not 5'9" 50 years ago, except my Nana, who probably honed her sewing skills on the necessity of sewing her own clothes because nobody made anything long enough for her in ready-to-wear fashions.

But I know how to sew. Not as well as my late lamented Nana (paternal grandmother for the curious) who could have done it for a living (and might well have at some point for all I know of her history). So as I knock off pounds and need new clothes, I'll just sew them myself.

There's nothing like a fitted bodice and full skirt to show off the fact that you've got boobs and hips. :)

Trying to stay positive...

I'm feeling very overwhelmed of late and very much like giving up. I feel like nothing I do is good enough for anybody, and no matter what I try, people (read: Cliff and/or Nicholas) are angry with me.

I've done a cut of my friends page. It's not that I changed my mind about whom I like or don't like; I'm just trying to keep things as positive as possible. So if I've cut you, don't get bent out of shape. It's not that I don't like you any more; in most cases, it's that either you don't post any more or you post a lot of negative things that I just can't take at this juncture. Most of my entries are public anyway, so feel free to keep me friended and continue reading and commenting if you like.

I didn't walk today and now it's getting dark and I don't like to walk after dark because I get scared and nobody will go with me except the dog. I really should feel pretty secure with CC's company, because as protective as he is, you'd better come at me with a gun or a moving vehicle if you intend to get past him. Anything less than lethal force is going to get you torn the hell up by one very protective dog.

I've been thinking about my weight a lot today. I've really let it get out of control. I don't even look like myself any more, I've gotten so heavy.

I've never been skinny. I'm tall and big-boned and I have big breasts and wide hips. I've always had to work out to stay reasonably slim and fit within the confines of my statuesque looks. The lightest I've been as an adult was 165 lbs, at which weight I wore a size 10-12 dress, and that's about as skinny as I need to be.



That's me at 165 and Mini-me at age 4 1/2. That dress was actually a size 8, but it was a fairly full-cut 8, although it fit me a bit tightly across the bosom. (And yes, I know, the glasses frames are really dated and not particularly flattering.) It doesn't really show you my figure because of the way Mini-me and I are sitting, but trust me, I still had tittays and junk in the trunk. I have some pictures from that time frame that do show my figure a bit better but they're under the bed in my parents' spare bedroom, where they will probably stay until I go up to my parents' house and use their scanner to scan in 20 or so years' worth of snapshots and other pictures. My measurements then were 36C-27-39. I don't even want to know what they are right now.

That's as skinny as I need to be. I've had people tell me that's too skinny.

I've also been giving some thought to my fashion sense or lack thereof at present. Right now, being disabled and broke, I don't leave the house much so I don't see any point in dressing any special way. I mostly wear t-shirts and either sweats or capris depending on the weather. About the only thing I really care about is that the shirt not clash with the bottoms.

I really like the fashions of the late 1940s into the 1950s. They're designed to show off an adult woman's figure, and even at my slimmest, I definitely have an adult woman's figure.

I'm thinking about, as I lose weight from the walking and stuff, starting to sew my own New Look/just-post-WWII influenced clothes, clothes meant to flatter a figure like mine, rather than trying to force my too-full figure into the skinny-girl, no-boobs, no-butt look that's popular today.

I'll still keep my t-shirts and sweats for hanging around the house or gardening or whatever, but I think I'm going to start researching sewing patterns for those kinds of clothes, for the times when I want to dress up and look good.

My mother and grandmother both have/had great fashion sense. My mother is one of those women who won't go down the driveway to the mailbox without full makeup and her hair done. I just can't fuss over myself that much. I never could, even in periods less depressive than present. And with the depression fight I'm in now, it's hard to make myself comb my hair and brush my teeth every day, much less put on makeup (makeup? When the hell do I wear makeup?) or do anything special with my hair. My grandmother, requiescat in pacem, did not wear much makeup as she came from a generation in which makeup was considered a bit trashy (powder, lipstick, and nail polish was about the extent of it), but she didn't leave the house without her hair done, her face powdered, her lips rosy, her hands manicured, and her shoes and bag matching her outfit. I kid you not, when we cleaned out her house after she died, we found no less than 100 pairs of shoes and 80 handbags in a veritable rainbow of colors and a broad spectrum of styles. (We also found what appears to have been a journal for every year of her life from the age of 18 or so until her death just shy of 78. I hope my aunt still has those. I asked her to keep them for me because I want them but I have no place to put them.)

Anyway, both of them for all appearances could color-coordinate in their sleep.

I've never felt feminine or pretty. I've always thought I was too tall and too big to be feminine, and I've always thought that my exotic (to put it nicely) facial features made me look kind of weird, although I've been told numerous times that I'm far from ugly. I'm not delicate or petite or any of the things that women are supposed to be. I'm as tall as (or in some cases taller than) a lot of men, and it just makes me feel like I'm not a real girl. Real girls are delicate and pretty, and I'm just not.

I guess I sort of hope that developing my own fashions, from designs meant to flatter a fuller figure, will make me feel feminine and/or pretty.