“Part of the /point/ of clothing, when thoughtfully chosen, is to enhance/disguise/manipulate the appearance of our body shape.”
I saw this in a comment online and it irked me, including and especially the emphasis on the word “point” as if I were an idiot for missing it and the inclusion of the word “thoughtfully” to indicate that those of us who would dress for any other reason are thoughtless.
I beg to differ. So might firefighters, triathlon participants and Weinerschnitzel employees. Of course, considering the roughly elebenty gabillion articles that exist at any one time in the magazines at the grocery store written about dressing for your body type/to hide your flaws/to look 10 pounds lighter etc. you’d think that nuns chose black because it’s slimming. Sadly, this is one of these situations where someone has confused their experience for everyone’s experience.
The point of clothes is whatever the wearer chooses. Clothing may be chosen
- to enhance/disguise/manipulate a body
- to cover a body
- to show off a body
- because someone liked the print
- to be in fashion
- to rebel against fashion
- because it was clean
- because they liked it
- because it fits their company’s dress code
- because it will protect them in a dangerous situation
- to please their mother
- to piss off their mother
- because they dance competitively and they aren’t allowed to wear jeans and a t-shirt (ok, maybe that one’s just me) anyway…
People may choose clothing for any reason at different times in their lives and in different circumstances. Not to mention that fat people have severely limited options when it comes to clothing choices. Even if we had every choice in the world, there is no law that says that clothing has to meet some criteria of being “flattering“. If I like the idea of a very clingy and bright horizontally striped tube dress then you can believe that I’ll be rocking that dress. Don’t like it? Hey look, over there, it’s a bunch of other stuff you could look at.
As always, you are the boss of your enhancing, disguising, manipulating underpants and I am the boss of my adorable cotton pink polka-dotted ones and that is as it should be.
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