Mall shopping

[cjsmith]

I don't get to malls very often any more. (Today rfrench volunteered to push a wheelchair. Yay rfrench!) It's a little like visiting a foreign country. The customs are strange, the rituals unfamiliar.

The first thing that hit us was the smell. We were probably downwind of a department store entrance on the floor below us. We also had the misfortune to pass Yankee Candle later on. We knew enough to hold our breath for that one.

I noticed how small the chests were on the female mannequins. They're perfect for young teens who are about in sixth grade and still have most of their growing to do. No wonder styles that would look good on me are never on display. I did see one store window with busty torsos in it. They looked almost like me! Except... it was Lane Bryant. Last time I went in there they laughed me right back out again.

My God, the SHOES. There are people who find those things attractive. I am pathetically grateful that I am now forever exempt.

Because I was at the mall already, I also bought a belt. Gap earns my eternal gratitude for having a clothing-related article that fit me last time I needed one AND wasn't discontinued before I needed another one.

What a world.

Comments

[rfrench.livejournal.com]

You didn't mention that you had to buy the belt in the "Gap for Kids" store...and it was a "medium".

[cjsmith.livejournal.com]

Well, yeah. I'm so tragically uncool that I still wear my belt on my waist.

[jcgbigler.livejournal.com]

> small-chested manequins

The following quote, from a NY Times Magazine article by Susan Cheever (unfortunately, the URL I had for the article no longer works) gives one plausible explanation:

There was a time when dinosaurs walked the earth. You could usually find them in the kitchen. They had curvy bodies and fleshy, deliciously rounded arms and shoulders, and you could hear them coming by the reassuring click, click, click of their heels. They were skilled in the Stone Age arts of ironing and mending and comforting their young. They wore red lipstick, spent hours filing their nails and had hair made of an unmanageable substance that had to be cleaned and curled by professionals. Their pointy bras and prehistoric girdles created artificial shapes with tiny midsections, but under their shirtwaist dresses their bodies were natural, built for hugging and for eating homemade gingersnaps right off the cookie sheet. Back in the land before time, when big breasts were more important than thin thighs, the ideal woman was an hourglass with wavy hair, a pretty name and a nurturing soul, a woman as sexy as Marilyn and as demure as Jacqueline. It was 1967.

Then came Twiggy.

Twiggy was the anti-woman: she had no breasts, she wore white lipstick, her nails were bitten, her shoulders were bony and her hair was cut like a boy's. She was the negative image of everything a woman was supposed to look like. She was so skinny it was hard to tell she was a woman at all. Instead of a shirtwaist, she wore a skirt no bigger than a proper lady's pocket handkerchief. Instead of standing as if she were balancing a book on her head, she was knock-kneed and coltishly awkward. She was everything unfeminine in a way that seemed, mysteriously, totally girlish. The power of her appeal redefined femininity. Though she was only a 91-pound teen-ager, she cast a gargantuan shadow over the image of the American housewife - a lovable species that would soon become extinct.

Twiggy landed at Kennedy airport in March 1967, in the spring of the Summer of Love; she got famous so fast that when she was first asked for an interview, she didn't know what an interview was. A 17-year-old high-school dropout, she was born Lesley Hornby, but her boyfriend, Nigel Davies, created her look and thought up names for both of them: Twiggy for her and Justin de Villeneuve for him. Twiggy became an instant icon, a symbol for a new kind of woman with a new kind of streamlined, androgynous sex appeal. She was the bodiless embodiment of a different way of looking and dressing and the different way of living that went with it.

In one way, the changes meant freedom. The new woman was a professional as well as a domestic - she had an economic and sartorial independence unheard of in the 1950's. She could travel alone and know the joys of providing for a family, and if she wanted to, she could hire someone to bake her cookies and comfort her children.

The freedom came with a set of draconian standards - not the least of which was a body type that is an impossible dream for most women over 30. In the 1960's, the average fashion model was 15 pounds lighter than the average woman; in the 1990's, the average fashion model is 35 pounds lighter and four inches taller than the average woman. Our ideal has left our reality in the dust. Even Twiggy was a harbinger of the low self-esteem to come. "I hated the way I looked then," she says of her 1967 self. These days we don't have to wear shirtwaists and lipstick and we do our own hair, but many of us have jeopardized our health and sanity in a desperate struggle to be thinner. We new women earn a lot of money; we spend a huge percentage of it trying to lose weight.

The icon leads one life and the real person leads another. The real Twiggy went on to grow up, gain weight, get married, star in a musical with Tommy Tune, have a daughter, move to Los Angeles and play Princess Georgina La Rue in the 1991 sitcom "Princesses." Now she lives in the Kensington section of London with her second husband, the actor Leigh Lawson. She's a slender 47-year-old with long hair; her friends call her Twigs. She's working on a television movie and writing her as yet untitled autobiography. Let's hope she tells us all to relax.

[cjsmith.livejournal.com]

It's fascinating how ideals change. Looking at fine art from the Renaissance versus a fashion plate from 1995 creates a stunning contrast.

I vacillate between being Way Too @#$! Small (short, size 5 1/2 feet, small band size on the bra, small waist -- my jeans size is TWO sizes too small to be carried in a store) and Way Too @#$! Big (cup size, quad-E width on the feet). I know it's possible to look "twiggy-ish": either tweak the hormones to match current fashion, or heck, if any woman quits eating for long enough she'll be an A cup. But not everyone has that body shape. It often surprises me that so few stores find it profitable to serve the rest of us.

I'm intrigued that the article said the average fashion model was only four inches taller than the average woman. Last I looked 5'4" was supposed to be the average woman (let's not try to figure out why anything below 5'6" is "petite") and when I lived with a big pile of fashion models not a one of them was below six feet.

[genderfur.livejournal.com]

I think 5'4" was the average for US women when I was a 5'5" teenager. The average goes up as generations get taller, and they *have* been getting taller.

I think it's worth pointing out that Twiggy Had Hips. They may not have had much flesh on them, but she did curve out after the waist. Today's fashion models don't seem to get even that much curve.

(And she started modelling at *15*. http://www.geocities.com/FashionAvenue/Catwalk/1038/twiggy.html )

[genderfur.livejournal.com]

I take it back. I've now done some research, and the average height for US women *is* about 5'4". But you have to remember that that includes all the elders who are shorter to begin with, and then shrink with age.

[tiger-spot.livejournal.com]

My God, the SHOES.

Every time I look for shoes, I come to the conclusion that I'm the wrong gender. Whichever side of the store I look in, those are Not The Right Shoes.

[cjsmith.livejournal.com]

Those wildly-shaped things women tie to the bottoms of their feet are Not Shoes, that is for sure!

[lkeele.livejournal.com]

There's a sex shop down the street from me here in Toronto, and the mannequins in the front window have torsos that make you look like a preteen. No shit. I don't even know how they keep them upright.

[cjsmith.livejournal.com]

Wow! Now if only they'd sell business-appropriate attire... :-)

[hitchhiker.livejournal.com]

they do - it's just a very different business (:

[aliceinfinland.livejournal.com]

Yankee Candle is a store that investment bankers and buyout firms loved enough to take public, take private and then take public again. Investment bankers without allergies, I'm guessing.

[cjsmith.livejournal.com]

It would be particularly amusing to find out that they perfume their stock certificates. ;-)