On Dignity + Dresses

I’ve developed this habit in dressing rooms in recent years: I turn away from the mirror before slipping a dress over my head. At the first telltale tug of fabric —snug in the shoulders, a moment of friction over my thighs—I take it off, discard it before I can even see how it looks. Like, I’m on to you, I won’t let you disappoint me, I see your failings before you can point out mine in this terrible light.

So when I took this particular dress out of the bag—a Christian Siriano cocktail-length number that would do equally well for a wedding or for work-to-drinks with a casual jacket and flats, lovely black satin with a stitched windowpane pattern—my expectations were low. I stepped into it reluctantly, ready for it to pull too tight across my bust or to find an ill-placed seam over my hips.

But instead, as I smoothed the dress down with my palms, I was moved almost to tears, a rush of an old, forgotten feeling. It had been so long since I had worn something so well and generously made. The fabric was heavy and thick with a bit of stretch, and a soft lining protected against any scratching from the embroidery. A heavy netting stitched into the skirt held a full bell shape and concealed clever slash pockets. The dress was stronger than any indentation of hip or softness of belly, a structural generosity that felt like the opposite of corset boning, a solid form that worked to accommodate rather than conceal me. This was a dress made to be beautiful, made to make me feel beautiful, with no demands that my hips be slimmer in order to participate. I felt something practically akin to gratitude towards Christian Siriano as a person: Thank you, I’d forgotten about this, thank you, for thinking of me.

I’ve been a bit fat the past few years. I say this as objectively as possible, a modifier just like blonde, a word that can be temporary or permanent. How’d that happen? I don’t know. The usual combination of reasons, I guess: Stress, age, medication shifts, a busy desk job that makes 10AM or 5PM Pilates classes impossible to attend, a partner who loves junk food and also me, no matter how taut or soft my belly. Shit happens, bodies change. My worst fears from my ED days came true without me noticing it: I was too busy watching the rest of my life finally come together, while slowly my clothes got too tight. And, somehow, everything was still fine. Better, maybe, than it’s ever been.

Aside from my closet, of course, which now pales in comparison to my size-zero days of discarded samples and fashion blog freebies. I did not buy many new clothes: I just kept wearing things that still fit. My wardrobe shrunk down to smock dresses, stretchy skater skirts, oversized sweaters. Tailored wool jackets, bodycon sequin cocktail dresses, and diaphanous scraps of silk began collecting dust in the back of my closet.

On some level, of course, I still felt the amorphous and constant sense of shame many women often feel about their bodies: a constant feeling that I was disappointing someone, maybe everyone, by not being young, thin, or pretty enough. But I have felt this, in the exact same intensity, every day of my adult life, entirely untethered to how I actually looked or what I was doing in the world. So who cares?

—

In 2018 I resolved to stop being such an asshole to myself: Take a lunch break, put down your phone, do a nice thing for yourself without shadowboxing yourself over a salary that permits you to pay someone else to dye your hair (evidence of a moral failing! betrayal of all your beliefs! you filthy capitalist!), do a nice thing for yourself without having reached some impossible goal first. So. Nice clothes: I’d owned and liked those once, right? I’d even been passionate about them.

I thought of how for a few months of one job in my early ‘20s, I’d spend my lunch breaks in the dressing room of Jeffrey on 14th Street, fawning over this one Gareth Pugh dress. FW09, metallic gunmetal grey leather, thick curving black stretch panels at the sides, skin-tight, high-necked. It fit like a glove, or a piece of armor—one of those sci-fi warrior looks that launched his first few collections. It cost about as much money as I made in a month.

One particular shop attendant came to know me; I wasn’t ashamed to be there so often. “I just feel like it was made for me,” I’d say to him, twisting around in the dressing room mirror, and he’d nod, almost sadly, in agreement. “Tell you what,” he said. “Nobody else here is buying that. When it’s on sale, I’ll let you know, ok?” And he did—a handwritten note on heavy stationery arrived at my shabby apartment a few weeks later. Dear Miss Clark, our new season of Gareth Pugh has arrived, and your dress—My dress! My! Dress!—is now reduced at 50%.

I did not buy the dress. (Even at 50% off, it cost more than my rent.) But what a feeling to cherish! And what a shame, I realized this year—slowly turning my inward rage outwards, a process that sometimes takes me years—to be deprived of that feeling. Why shouldn’t I have that experience anymore, just because my body at the moment is softer and larger than it sometimes is?

So. I got this Rent the Runway subscription. I’d long thought of it as mainly rentals for sorority events and weddings, but was surprised to learn that a very chic friend’s Opening Ceremony jacket was from an unlimited subscription there, and decided to try it out. (I promise you this is not sponsored by them, this is just a heartfelt essay about me spending money to deal with my body.) It seemed to me a way to resolve some dissonance: my body may not stay this size, but maybe I’ll feel better about myself if I can wear something other than these old smock dresses. Maybe I can treat myself to this, low commitment, no guilt, just see if that nice-things feeling can still exist, wherever my body is at.

What so moved me, standing in my living room in this Christian Siriano dress, was the realization of just how deprived I’d been of this feeling—the joy of being transformed by beautiful things, of a hem slipping between thumb and forefinger, the weight of heavy wool or the drape of bias-cut silk. A thing I’ve missed out on for the past few years because I had quietly grown ashamed of my not-very-slim figure, a shame perpetuated by the fact that rarely do the designers I love bother with clothes above a size 8. When I look into the windows of Saks or Barney’s, wispy dresses hung in rows of four (0, 2, 4, 6), the message is clear: This is not for you.

My body has been fat and my body has been deathly thin—every size from a 0 to 16 has lived in my closet at some point. My general feeling towards it at all sizes has been something along the lines of ughhhhh what is this THING, this alien thing I have to carry around, this stupid thing that hurts and bleeds and apparently inspires either lust or revulsion. Clothes had always helped define that, for me: costumes and roles that helped me act out a place in the world, trying on new skins that felt more comfortable, or more me, than just a wretched bag of bones and flesh. Clothes can give us a sense of dignity, a thing I think we can agree everyone deserves, regardless of size. And I’d forgotten that, until this dress reminded me.