Rebuilding a sense of style, part I

Shifting foundation

(CW: In this essay I reference some specific disordered eating behaviors. I don’t use any numbers, but if this kind of thing is triggering for you, take care.)

What is your least favorite word, the one that makes you cringe every time you read or hear it? Is it moist? Smear? Mine is “belly.” I hate this word so much. I’m triggered in yoga classes or when talking about packaging with a client. I have, since adolescence, associated the word “belly” with deep shame, knowing that my body was different than other girls’ in a way that was not acceptable. “You have a belt stomach,” one of my middle school friends informed me, referring to the way my body stored fat above as well as below my waistline, in what would be called a FUPA—fatty upper pubic area— now. I was 12 or 13 the first time someone helpfully suggested I “suck it in.” None of my friends’ bodies seemed to be shaped this way, carrying weight in their lower abdomens and breasts with thin legs and narrow-ish hips. I wasn’t fat, exactly, just differently shaped. I felt it was something I should be ashamed of, even if I couldn’t articulate why, and my focus when getting dressed was on trying to hide this part of myself so I could look “normal.”

Sometimes I wasn’t able to, and in my 20s I was often mistaken for being pregnant, a completely reasonable assumption given the distribution of fat on my body: slender, athletic-ish legs, relatively narrow hips, a round protruding belly and a huge rack (a high school friend called it “tomato on toothpicks”). At the time, I would get hurt and upset when well-meaning strangers would ask if I was having a boy or when I was due, but in hindsight, though they should not have been asking these questions, I do look pregnant much of the time. When I got my first covid vaccination, the nurse recommended I stay an extra 15 minutes for observation since I was pregnant. I thought about saving her some embarrassment and just hanging out, but I had stuff to do so I gently told her I was just bloated from my period, which was true, and I reassured her that I understood and it was okay.

The shame of my belly has been something I’ve carried since those first comments in middle school, hanging like a sign just in front of my face so I have to look at it all the time. I felt like my body required constant vigilance, and I was almost always actively engaged in disordered eating behaviors and/or thinking about how to cover it up. In my early 30s, some combination of lifestyle changes and the particular birth control I was on caused my belly to go down quite a bit—not go away, it’s never gone away—and with relief and joy I thought the decades of shame were finally over for good. (If you followed me on instagram or knew me IRL sometime in 2015-2018, this is the image you’re familiar with.) Using pretty intense shape wear, I could wear flat front pants and pencil skirts and I felt free. My body was finally listening to me, the shame was gone. So I doubled down. I went raw vegan. I allowed myself one lunch a week. I became one of those very smug thin assholes who thinks they know how their own body works, so they know how everyone’s body works, and would think things like, “losing weight was so easy, I don’t understand why everyone doesn’t do it.” Which, I understand now, is an extremely garbage and yet very common take!

But after five or so years, my waistline started to slip away. I had gotten married and felt I needed to cook more, so I stopped a lot of my restrictive behaviors. In my late 30s I went off hormonal birth control on the advice of my gynecologist, and soon I noticed my wiggle dresses getting too tight. I couldn’t zip my pencil skirts anymore, and after a few years my favorite belts were on their last holes. I was diagnosed with PCOS, a combination of metabolic and endocrine disorders that can cause a litany of unfun symptoms, including facial hair, extremely painful periods, insulin resistance and weight gain. Not wanting to go back on hormonal birth control for some reason,¹ I tried to claw my way back using the tricks that had “worked” in the past, like fasting with only hot salt water and walking more than working during the day, but my body kept growing. I saw doctors and nutritionists and therapists, some of whom tried to encourage me to accept my body and move on. So every year I bought bigger clothes and they would be too small by the next season (which, when you are committed to buying vintage or ethical slow fashion, is incredibly expensive and frustrating). The stresses of my job, the 2020 election and the pandemic weren’t helpful, and because the years when I was thin were the years I was visible and stylish on social media, it felt as though the entire identity I had built belonged to someone else and in its place was something old and familiar and unwelcome. My belly was back, bigger than ever before, and so was the shame.

This shame was rooted in a deep anti-fatness that I think most of us hold whether we are conscious of it or not, owing to centuries of cultural conditioning from religion to racism.² I think this is mostly because we believe, despite scientific evidence that is much more complicated, that human body shape and size is always within one’s control. Fat bodies, many people believe, are the result of intentional or ignorant overindulgence and therefore, to be fat is to be a failure of either willpower or intellect or both.

But I think for a lot of people, women in particular and perimenopausal/menopausal women in particular particular, this doesn’t feel true. And what if it isn’t true, as a growing body (no pun intended) of evidence suggests?³ What if the control you have in the long term is actually very limited? What if bodies are just different and being fat or having a belly is no more a marker of vice than being thin is of virtue (and more than that, what if, regardless of a person’s body size, by default they deserve compassion and respect as humans)? Would that change the way you felt about fat people? About yourself?

It has taken me years of living with this body to come to this point. The trouble is, even if you personally can move beyond the shame, the rest of the world is probably still judging your body. It’s not enough for you to love or even just accept your physical form, if you are in a fat body, it’s not unrealistic to assume that others are judging you as lazy and/or stupid because their biases are still intact. And so people in larger bodies usually don’t get compassion or respect, multiplied for Black or disabled or queer or other marginalized identities further from the power and resources of straight cis white thin able-bodied male. Being outwardly desirable gets you pretty far in this life, and seeing your body change in ways that move you away from desirable can be scary.⁴ When we say things like “I wish I had her figure,” often what we’re really wishing for is what we assume she has based on that figure: praise, attention, affirmation, acceptance, love, respect. We want to show the world that we are worthy to live in it, that we are not lazy or stupid, and it doesn’t occur to us that simply being in the world makes us worthy to be here, that what we owe to each other is a standard of care and respect that is completely irrespective of what our bodies look like. But that respect is simply not forthcoming for everyone.

The thing is, for a lot of folks, it’s possible to pursue health-promoting behaviors like regular exercise, good sleep and stress management, a diet full of fruits and vegetables and fiber and healthy fats and proteins, and still not have a body that conforms to cultural expectations. Setting aside the reality that these behaviors are not accessible for everyone, for those of us who are able to afford the time and money it takes to work out and prepare nutritious food every day, it can feel incredibly shameful when those behaviors don’t produce the results that diet culture says they should. And, as a shocking corollary, it is not possible to know someone’s health status just by observing their body. It is not possible to know what someone eats or how they move or whether they have an eating disorder just by looking at them. And more than that, it is none of your business. There is so much judgment on the internet from smug thin assholes who have never been fat who think they know how everyone’s body works (and think they need to tell you how your body works), and the specter of those thin assholes is really what has kept me feeling like I needed to stay hidden until I figured out how to make my body small again.

But my body probably won’t be small again, and my waistline is only a memory on my IG feed. The years of restriction plus my metabolic disorder and now perimenopause have probably altered my metabolism⁵ in such a way that it won’t function the way it did when I was 32. So if I’m going to live a fulfilling life from here, the shame has to go. And if you’ve made it this far and are protesting, thinking something like, “but have you tried _____? what if you _____?” I am here to tell you I have either tried it or researched/rejected it or both and if I do not let go of the hope of fitting into my old clothes, even the ones from just two years ago, the futile pursuit of shrinking myself will continue to dominate my thoughts and I will not accomplish anything meaningful with the second half of my life. I’m interested in all kinds of health-promoting behaviors and my fitness is steadily improving, but I still have PCOS, and I still have my belly. And now I have to figure out how to dress it.

I love these linen pants from Babaà and I am sick of not wearing them because they are unflattering

And what if I started dressing for fun? What if I started breaking some of my rules designed to hide my belly? What if I put together color and texture in a weird way that was joyful and inspirational and a bit silly but completely creative that represents what I love about myself? (I hear that this vibe is actually kind of trending right now, but since I haven’t cared about a mainstream fashion trend since 2009, I thought I had come to this road all by myself and not through some collective consciousness. Nope!)

So that’s the project. It’s heavily inspired by frump, as outlined in Emma Copley Eisenberg’s 2017 piece “Notes on Frump,” which also reminded me of this post from 2006 by Erin McKean, particularly this part:

“You Don’t Have to Be Pretty. You don’t owe prettiness to anyone. Not to your boyfriend/spouse/partner, not to your co-workers, especially not to random men on the street. You don’t owe it to your mother, you don’t owe it to your children, you don’t owe it to civilization in general. Prettiness is not a rent you pay for occupying a space marked ‘female’”.

“Prettiness is not a rent you pay for occupying a space marked ‘female’” stuck with me for so long, but when I got thin and discovered vintage (different from the thrifting of weird shit I used to do), it vacated my head completely. I couldn’t separate my appearance from the need to appeal to men,⁶ the need to be listened to and approved of. But as Erin goes on to say,

Pretty, it’s sad to say, can have a shelf life. It’s so tied up with youth that, at some point (if you’re lucky), you’re going to have to graduate from pretty. Sometimes (as in the case with Diana Vreeland, above, you can go so far past pretty that you end up in stylish, or even striking (or the fashion-y term jolie laide) before you know it. But you won’t get there if you think you have to follow all the signs that say “this way to Pretty.” You get there by traveling the route you find most interesting.

So what does interesting look like? And why does it matter? Why would I bother defining or even thinking about what my style is when I only leave the house two or three times a week? Because when I do want to leave the house, I need it to take less than ten minutes to get dressed. Because I don’t want to waste money on more things that won’t fit or feel good. Because I still value clothing and style as a means of creative expression. Feeling comfortable and confident isn’t trivial or selfish, it can be a foundation on which all kinds of work and joy and growth and participation in the world is built. A great outfit can be a key to self-actualization, even if—especially if—you decide that the most interesting route is the one that is frumpy, unsexy, formless. As middle age renders me less visible in the world, the feeling of adopting frump and claiming my belly is like a warm cabin in the woods, with my weird garden (mugwort and rue, anyone?) and seven cats, crochet blankets and quilts made from all the clothing from my past that could no longer be worn.

For Part II of this style rebuilding, I’ll be going to Frump School and learning how to dress myself again.

1. The reason is that I was really into wellness trends and being as “clean” and healthy as possible, and in the last decade or so there has been a big backlash amongst wellness girlies against synthetic hormones, that they cause cancer and bone loss and other unspecified issues that I don’t really remember now but was very sure of back then. Five years of more frequent migraines and sickening cramps and I was like okay enough, give me them hormones.

2. For an incredibly detailed summation of how we got here, I highly recommend Sabrina Strings’ 2019 book Fearing the Black Body: The Racial Origins of Fat Phobia.

3. For more on this, I recommend Body of Truth by Harriet Brown, Anti-Diet by Christy Harrison, You Just Need to Lose Weight: And 19 Other Myths about Fat People by Aubrey Gordon and the entire Maintenance Phase podcast.

4. This is summed up with the concept of Desire Capital by Da’shaun L. Harrison in Belly of the Beast: The Politics of Anti-Fatness as Anti-Blackness. I admit I’m still working through this one, it’s a pretty dense and challenging but important book.

5. This comes from the books referenced in note 3, but on page 21 of You Just Need to Lose Weight Aubrey sums it up: “Weight loss is also associated with weight cycling, or repeated loss and gain of weight, sometimes described as ‘yo yo dieting.’ Whatever its cause, a research review of 23 studies with over 440,000 participants linked weight cycling to an increased risk of cardiovascular disease, hypertension, and mortality from all causes. Some research indicates that dramatic weight loss may permanently suppress one’s metabolism.” This last is a reference to what is known as The Biggest Loser Study, which suggests that the body will fight to regain weight that was lost intentionally and will alter metabolism to do so.

6. Not that I was looking for romantic relationships, but if you work with men it’s a lot easier to get them to listen to you if they think you’re pretty.