An overheated rant about clothes

I hate the summer. I hate the heat, I hate the clothes, and I hate the amount of feet on display. It’s quite possible I’d feel differently if the heat didn’t make me want to throw up/pass out, if I went brown, and if I didn’t have an anti-fetish about toes, but as it is, I hate the summer and complain relentlessly about it all the time that I am relishing holidays and not spending an hour in the morning trying to warm up enough to take off my fifteen layers of clothes in order to get into a hot bath.

Mainly I hate the clothes, and mainly this is because I live in the land of people who go a lovely toasty brown as soon as the sun appears, and therefore I do not appear interestingly pale, but rather sadly underdone. If I had lovely brown legs, I’d happily wear little summer dresses, and if I didn’t hate feet I’d happily wear strappy little sandals, and not complain at all, or sit around in a haze of heat irritation looking critically at other people’s clothing choices.

Things I’d say to other people about their clothing choices
Anyone wearing low-cut jeans: Girls, I know you looked at yourself in the mirror before coming out and thought you looked really cute showing off a pretty curvy waist and a nice brown tummy between your t-shirt and your jeans, and you do – from the front you look very cute. But have you seen yourself from the back? The miniscule little bit of body fat you have has all been shoved up over your waistband, and your bottom looks as though it’s been put in a sandwich toaster. I’m not quite sure that’s the look you were going for.

Anyone wearing harem pants: WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU? Never has such a horrible garment been invented. You couldn’t possibly have bought those because you thought they looked good, so you must have been sucked in by the hype, which is all lies. If I read another word from some deranged fashion writer claiming that they are comfortable and flattering to all body types, I will scream. How comfortable can something be that makes you walk as though you’d just shat yourself? And the horrible truth about them is that they are unflattering to everyone, across the board: they make tall slender girls look as though they are tall not-slender girls, and anyone else – particularly anyone else with hips or a tummy (who seem irresistibly drawn to them) – look as though they have more hips and tummy than they started out with.

Anyone wearing weird blouson-type tops: Why? Really, why? If you have a waist, it’s lost in the billows, and if you don’t have one I’m afraid it’s billowing out over the daft tight bit at the bottom of your top (which is sitting in a particularly hideous way at the top of your bottom).

Things other people would say to me about my clothing choices (and sometimes do)
Aren’t visible bra straps so at least a decade ago? Oh, shut up. Until it stops being hot enough to wear strappy little tops, and until bra manufacturers and strappy little top manufacturers manage to align their strap positioning, I’m going to be flashing a plethora of straps. And anyway, this isn’t just a summer thing: I have such weedy narrow shoulders that things are always falling off them, and my bra straps are always on display at some point. Interestingly, this works as a perfectly good reason to buy expensive underwear (better visible-strap quality).

Leggings? Why? Really, why? OK, look, I really tried to resist the leggings-lure. I swore that I’d so overdone leggings in the 80s that nothing would induce me back into them. But then I wobbled, and finally I fell back into their soft, stretchy embrace again. Plus, in the part of my mind which revises my fashion-rules to suit myself, you can wear leggings with a little summer dress in a way that you can’t wear stockings with it: this works even if you’re wearing cropped leggings that show roughly the same amount of pale leg-skin as would be showing if you just wore the dress (OK, strictly speaking, probably none of this works, but it does in my heat-frazzled mind, quite possibly in the same way that other people look at themselves in harem pants and think “Comfortable AND flattering! Result!”). By the same reasoning, you can wear leggings and a top, and if people think you are wearing a ridiculously short dress with nothing more than a pair of tights, you can just roll your eyes and say “But they’re LEGGINGS” which are practically trousers, even though they look exactly like tights (my favourite piece of clothing is a pair of glorified leggings which masquerade as trousers (they have pockets and a zip), allowing me to pretend that I’m perfectly respectably dressed whilst still basically saying: Check out my long skinny legs and pert little ass). You may well mock leggings, people, but they are a godsend for people who don’t tan and who are vain about their legs. Granted, they are kind of the anti-sex (although apparently not as much as my much-loved wooly tights), but they can be yanked down to your knees pretty quickly.

If something is too tight to wear underwear with it, don’t you think that maybe it’s just TOO TIGHT? No. (I can’t answer at any more length because then I might stop remembering to hold my tummy in).

Don’t be silly, of course your legs aren’t too white to wear dresses! … Oh. Right. Leggings – good choice. And I was wearing fake tan!

You know, there’s a fine line between “quirky and original” and “odd”. I know. This IS quirky and original.