Fashion Post 3: Tight

(This would have been Belated Fashion Forward, and it was going to be about tight tops, but then Postacademic mentioned pegged jeans, and I've been meaning to say a few word about leggings, so I thought I'd combine all three under the general theme of tight clothes.)

1. Tops

I'm not quite sure why I've always worn my tops loose and boxy (and preferably hitting just above my hip bones). Certainly it started with being somewhat in the way of overweight, in my early 20s, but that has not been the case for, my god, it's been 15 years. Then it also had something to do with the bra situation (and the situation of what is inside the bra) (or not, depending on how you want to look at it) (or maybe better that you don't look), because the bras were not so good, and there was the nipple issue, and the shapelessness issue (if such an absence can even be considered shapeless). But it was more than that, some kind of aversive, body-unfriendly habit, but also a desire for comfort that I thought was most achievable in looseness.

Changed my mind.

And I'm not quite sure why that either. I have been wearing tight turtlenecks for a while now, the ribbed kind that were preppy back in the day but are now just there, or maybe they're still preppy and I don't care, but turtlenecks are inherently concealing, and mine are always dark colors, which makes them even more concealing, especially around the bra area.

Then I was in H&M a few weeks ago. And the new bras had recently been purchased (did I mention the new bras? the ones from the Target girls department? someone said they were appalled to see molded bras in the girls department when they were buying their toilet-training toddler Dora underpants, but I selfishly, in this case, do not care about the implications for girls, I am just so thrilled to have solved the bra dilemma, thanks to Dawn's sister, and at any rate the point is that the new bras have removed the bra self-consciousness from the tops arena).

So there I was at H&M, and I did my usual try-on-fifteen-items-of-clothing-and-reject-90%-of-them thing, only what I didn't reject, to my surprise, was a snug, V-necked t-shirt which looked just lovely and felt just great, and which I proceeded to purchase in pale green, brown, and fuschia (and H&M sure does have a weird website where I can't even imagine how I might find a t-shirt from a month ago to display to my loyal readers). And with that I have been converted to someone who wears tight tops (even, sometimes, with one of the old not-so-good bras), and I can't imagine what I was thinking all those years.

2. Jeans

I can't do it. It's amazing to me how quickly they looked normal, those skinny jeans like Kate and Sienna and Mary-Kate and Lindsay and all of them are suddenly wearing, how obsolete the boot-legs that fill my closet suddenly appear, and yet, though I am not a particularly large person, there is a distinct largerness to my hips than there is to my ankles, and of course everyone is larger in their hips than in their ankles, but I do believe that to pull off the long skinny jeans look, there must be a certain ratio of hip to ankle or perhaps it is an angle that somehow should approximate a straight line, yes, it is the angle, and mine most certainly has nothing to do with a straight line, but rather forms an inverted triangle of sorts, and I can only imagine that a jean with a narrow ankle will hopelessly exacerbate the widerness of the hips, and I'm just not ready to go there. Maybe I will be eventually, a la the tight tops, but not yet, and right now not yet feels like forever.

Still, I know that Kate and Sienna and Mary-Kate and Lindsay are right, and I am wrong (and don't even go telling me there's no such thing as right and wrong when it comes to jeans, because you know that's not true, and I will accept that right and wrong are relative concepts, dependent upon such factors as age, location, and body type, and perhaps it is my issue that I am in denial about the fact that I am not Kate, Sienna, Mary-Kate, or Lindsay, but that's ridiculous, because I know full well that I am not and do not in any way resemble said females, either in lifestyle or physique, and yet, there is no question that they are better at jeans than I am, and I just need to live with that).

3. Leggings

Here I must beg to differ from the brilliant women of Go Fug Yourself, though in general I bow to their superior wisdom. I think leggings are cute. Not the way we used to wear them in the 80s, with the loose top over the tight leggings, but in the current leggings under mini-skirt/dress look. And not that I myself will be adopting that look (see "Jeans," and cross reference all posts with the words "too old), but as the mother of a fashion-conscious pre-teen I am totally down with it, and M and I have agreed that the major fall purchase must be leggings.

Sorry, folks, but that's it for fashion, for now.