Grumble Clothes Shopping Grumble

If you were to ask me the downside of being female, I would give you an immediate answer. It's shopping for clothing.

Rant warning in effect. Semi-long post.

Oh, yes. I lamented last evening about about being a member of the physically weaker sex. That's okay - I just need to be stronger than the rest of the women in the gym, or at least most of 'em, and that's not really too much of an issue. But this clothes shopping thing has many dimensions to it. If you're male, you may appreciate your significant other's or sister's perspective to it all. Or, maybe I'm just so far afield of "normal" human females that everyone will leave scratching their heads.

I have this instant business trip that came pretty much out of a known but long-ago-dismissed nowhere. Work clothing for me is usually jeans and a nice shirt, but this will be business casual. I don't have much by way of business casual clothing, and I've been looking to more often wear some nicer things, so it's time for some new dress pants.

The first issue here is sizing. Sizing seems to be such a bigger deal with women than it is with men. We have two distinct problems here. One - HIPS. Hello - those are always different, no? And then there's the top half problem - breasts. Major variance. To contrast, when I shop with Brian, I know he's a 33 - 30 or a 34 - 30. Easy!

Those are the obvious things. The non-obvious things are - am I poochy today in the belly (you know - ate in restaurants the past two days, so things aren't as taut as normal) - What time of the month is it? Am I carrying water weight? These affect fit within a size more than size, but you still have to figure this all through. The sizing algorithm, when applied, will tell the woman whether it's all right to buy that slightly-too-tight miniskirt.

I ended up buying two pairs of size 10 pants and one pair of size 8 pants, so that sounds consistent, no? Heather's a 10. Au contraire, for, you see, I had in my hands at various times size 12s, size 10s, and size 8s. Because womankind, myself included, likes to wear the smallest size it can fit moderately comfortably into, when I saw that the 10s would work on the whole, I didn't even bother with the 12s. The 8s were a mystery, though. It was like, uh, did the printer goof the sizing chart? I believe the 8s are the loosest of the three. Boggle.

And then there were the skirts, and these were a pain. I prefer skirts, but they have to be either short or ankle weight because otherwise my legs look like, uh, I lift a lot of weight with them - I have some pretty full calves. Calf-length skirts are good for women who would like their calves to look more shapely. Not I, says Heather. I took a bevy of skirts back to the fitting room - 10s and 12s. The 10s were too big. I mean, tooooo big. So I found a collection of 8s. Yeah, you guessed it - buttoned and were comfortable, but they were too tight to actually look good. So, no skirts. If I NEEDED a skirt, I could've gone somewhere else, but, well, who NEEDS skirts when pants will do.

And, the final point - the most irritating of the three. OTHER WOMEN! IN FITTING ROOMS! Catty whiny female voices wafting over the fitting room stalls. I heard the word "cute" in so many connotations today I wanted to cleanse myself. "That's cute, but it doesn't fit me right." "That's so CUTE!" What is cute, ladies? What does it mean? I can't abide by "cute" for my body. It needs to be professional or sexy or functional. Not cute. And the whining. I realize some people just whine - that's all they do, their only vocal inflection. This one woman whined about every cute piece of clothing her mother or daughter (not sure which she was) brought her. Ugh.

And then the fitting rooms themselves. Because this is Saturday, the fitting rooms were fairly full. I found myself in one on the end whose door wouldn't quite close. I was changing into a skirt when another woman, whose brain must've been trapped in Kohl's shopping oblivion, backs into my little room area. She proceeds to get ready to hang up her things. Just because you THINK someone's not in the little room doesn't make it so, sugarpie. She seemed quite startled when I said, "hello." My natural reaction (curbed, of course) was to say, "Yes?" It happened again, and then I got smart and put my shoes to where they could be seen under the door.

So I'm home. I have pants. It's over. So, men, when your ladies come home exhausted, realize that a lot of that is mental. Too much estrogen in the fitting room. And "sizes" aren't sizes.

hln

Posted by hln at October 25, 2003 01:42 PM | RANT | TrackBack