wannabe glamourpuss

My style, ladies and gentlemen, could only be classified, if you find it absolutely necessary to do so, as lazy. I am usually perfectly content with throwing on whatever is clean and close at hand, jeans and whatever shirt I happen upon first being the typical fare.

However, I believe I have the soul of a dandy. The idea of high fashion – that of bygone eras mostly; what passes for fashion today I can’t say does much for me – makes me swoon. And I’m not exactly gender-specific in my daydreaming, either. I long to strut around in a frock coat and cocked hat as much as I want to dance a quadrille in an empire-waist gown and elbow-length gloves. (No, I’m not limited to Regency dress, I’ve just been reading and/or watching a lot of Jane Austen as of late.) Also, unlike Jane Lane’s paramour in “Life in the Past Lane,” I don’t believe in segregating garments according to time periods. A 40s dress with 50s shoes – blasphemy? Well, only insofar as the George Bernard Shaw quote defines blasphemies. Victorian punk, steampunk… Is there a Regency punk? Should be. Without a TARDIS, it’s the only way to flout the time-space continuum and not incur some hefty consequences.

I’m endlessly concocting fantasy ensembles in my head, some grand, some simple, all of them wonderful and outlandish, like fabric versions of Jenna’s crazy, fabulous pies. Thinking about them makes me happy; thinking about wearing them puts me right over the moon.

They never come to fruition, money being the first and foremost reason. I know affordable vintage finds are generally the jurisdiction of flea markets and thrift shops, but I have yet to come across one that offered anything that would even come close to fitting me, and I am not even remotely handy with a needle, so making alterations myself is out. Commissioning someone to do them for me puts me right back at square one; gifted seamsters do not come cheap, nor should they.

I suppose these roadblocks could be overcome by someone stubborn and determined enough to find a way, any way, around them. Where there’s a will and all that. Yet in my case, there’s something a lot harder to surmount standing in my way.

I don’t really believe I deserve it. Unconsciously, at least. When I think about it for a while and dig.

Not for any pressing moral reasons. There aren’t any great, villainous misdeeds in my past that have rendered me unworthy of looking stunning and amassing a wardrobe that would make any moneyed socialite jealous.

Nah, it’s a lot subtler than that.

See, I’m still in the infant stages of fat acceptance. As far as I feel I’ve come, of course there’re still problems, still the relentless voice of the kid who sat in front of me in sixth grade hissing back of his shoulder about how ugly I was, how I seemed to get fatter and more disgusting day by day. (Considering how many there’ve been, I don’t quite understand why it is that his voice is the one that always stands out among all the others, but whatever. That’s a question I’ll save for therapy.) I doubt he’ll be going very far for any great length of time, no matter how hard I work to get him out. So you can probably imagine what it was like before I discovered the fat acceptance movement.

On the day of my Confirmation, during my senior year of high school, I got Dressed Up, took more care with my appearance than I could remember ever doing, even went to the salon to have my hair arranged in an updo by a professional. The Confirmation was an utterly pointless ceremony that I was only agreeing to participate in to keep my mother happy and I figured I deserved some serious primping into the bargain. I actually felt pretty taking my seat in the church.

There was a boy in the pew behind me. Funnily enough, he had been friendly with that other boy all those years before. He’d said some nasty things himself over time. He didn’t say a word that evening, but he didn’t have to. His very presence wiped out the meager allowance of self-esteem I’d scraped up for myself in the course of dolling myself up. How the hell could I have possibly thought I was pretty?

In the intervening years, scenes like this have played out constantly, although my own reflection has usually taken the place of the silently jeering bully. I feel wonderful and attractive as I scrutinize my face in the bathroom mirror in the morning, and the mild euphoria lasts throughout the day…until I catch my face in a store window or a photograph later on. I hear all those voices and it’s over. And while this tendency (and the resultant depressiong) has faded gradually during the past few months as I read blogs like Shapely Prose and hit mute on the TV so I don’t have to listen to the eight zillion commercials for weight-loss miracle pills and diets, it’s still very much with me.

It will probably be with me for a very long time. But I’ll fight it, because I know I do deserve what I want and that the voices are wrong. Someday I’m going to be a glamourpuss, fat and fantastic and eccentric, even if only within my small and wonderful circle of friends.