“They fit,” I cry with no small amount of triumph from inside a changing room of a popular high-street store.
“Do they just fit? Or do they fit properly?” says my friend standing on the other side of those precariously held together curtains that can only promise and never actually give privacy.
“Nothing is bulging out,” is my reply.
She pulls aside the curtain and looks me over. I do the customary twirl to show her that we’ve finally found a pair of skinny jeans into which I can fit.
“They don’t fit. Get a smaller size.” My friend is a fashion sage, but sometimes she’s also a styling-dominatrix.
“I’m a size ten, these fit.”
“If you can put on a pair of new skinny jeans and still breath, you need a size smaller.”
OK… take two.
I try another pair. I hop, skip, jump, wiggle — all in the 1-foot-by-1-foot area of the changing room. I hit my elbow against one corner, stub my toe on another.
I’m embarrassed till, through another sheeting, I see a woman positively pirouette to stuff herself into the same pants.
These jeans make me waddle rather than walk, but I buy them anyway. I wear them despite the fact that kneeling, crossing my legs, even sitting down straight causes blood to stop flowing through my lower body. I buy them because my friend says, “Oh my god, how good does your ass look in them?!”
Does it? I would turn my head to see, but I’m scared a button may pop if my torso moves even the slightest. (Later, at dinner where I eat a burger and drink one too many fizzy drinks, the button does indeed pop.)
My dear fashion industry. I’ve thanked you for many things: over-the-knee boots so I won’t have to shave my legs every time I wear a skirt; off shoulder peasant tops to hide my burger-belly while fooling people into thinking the rest of me is as slender as that shoulder. I’m even okay with the endless stream of stripes that make me look like a notebook on which something should be written because at least they remind me to work on days I’m feeling lazy.
But for years now, I’ve had a bone to pick with you. It’s been nearly a decade that you’ve been telling women to wear these corsets for their legs. And not just legs, but my hips and my crotch have some broken bones they’d like to throw at you.
Ten years of pretending to enjoy having little to no feeling below our waists. I’m not just over-the-moon you’re finally moving on to the 70s flare, and the oversized trousers. I’m can-caning in my new bell bottoms, because, in them, I finally can!
And when the distressed skinny leaves the building, I’ll be even more grateful. Raise your hands all the women who are too scared to sit in those. Whose thigh fat doesn’t protrude from those punk chic (but pre-made) rips?
I’m been waiting years to finally ring this bell: The Skinny Jean is DEAD! Look at the Spring/Summer 2018 collections and you’ll see nary a leg corset in sight. It’s all about the oversized trousers and pant suits now, baby.
Anomaly Spring Summer 2018
Tory Burch Spring Summer 2018
Alexandra Grecco Spring Summer 2018
My crotch, squeezed as it has been between my thunder thighs and that elastic denim bondage attire that you kept me in for so long, feels alive again. Donning my flare trousers, I feel like the women who burned their bras in the ’60s. I’m a more sociable person now that I don’t have to remove my undies from between my vag-crack every five minutes.
It is, however, sad that the trick for this, which I spent hours devising, won’t be useful anymore. It looks like this:
When else is a girl gonna get to do this anymore?
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