Saturday, April 19, 2008

Sometimes a burqa seems like a pretty damn good option

Fresh from the insult and injury that is commonly referred to as "clothes shopping," Knitcrit would like to take this opportunity to scream SCREW YOU, RETAIL DEMONESS AND ALL OF YOUR UNHOLY, HEADSET-WEARING, "CAN I START A DRESSING ROOM FOR YOU?" MINIONS.

All Knitcrit wanted was a pair of white, ivory or stone-colored dressy-ish professional looking pants (read: not rumpled chinos).

Bloomingdale's: Desirable, but price point for single article of clothing is approximately equivalent to my monthly rent. Having entered there in the past, I have abandoned hope of finding things remotely within my budget. Plus, how much of that $500 do the Chinese prisoners see? Not much, I bet.

Century 21: These pants are perfect. Except they're size 14. And they have a spot on the hem.

Banana Republic: The home of affordable corporate secretary wear. You can almost hear the heels clacking in and out of the boardroom. Fabric is generally crap, with poor drape, making panty lines almost certainly inevitable, regardless of panty choice. Likely to give students impression that I am their secretary, an attitude actually present in many students today and therefore not one that needs encouraging.

Benetton: Unlined white pants.

Montmartre: Perfect ivory pants! Oh. Wait. $430. Never mind.

Ann Taylor: Lined white pants, nice Italian wool, but at this quintessentially middle American store, they have so radically skewed their sizing to accommodate the quintessentially middle American big ass that a SIZE ZERO is too big on me. And okay, I'm on the slender side, but I come by it naturally, and anyway, this is Manhattan, for Christ's sake - it's not like there aren't hundreds of thousands of rail-thin 21-year-olds skulking around looking longingly in the windows of the ubiquitous New York slice pizza joint. Where do THEY get their pants?

JCrew: I fought my way through mounds of day-glow paper-thin cashmere cardigans and the 16-year-olds who love them only to discover that JCrew does not have white, ivory, or stone pants, though navy is on offer. Unsure what they are thinking - what would go better with day-glo paper-thin cashmere cardigans than white pants?

I guess this is probably a sign that anyone who works with dry erase markers as much as I do probably shouldn't be buying light colored pants anyway.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

As a genetically larger American and grad student who shoves whatever she has time for into the pie hole, I also have an excruciatingly hard time finding any sort of item that even remotely fits my plump body. I know this for certain though, the American clothes designer doesn't actually want anyone to wear their clothes, just look at them on the rack and feel bad when not one of them fits. I would love to shop at bloomies or even J. Crew. None of which fit a fat little grad student. To top it off, being short is even worse because EVERYTHING has to come up because it's all too long.

I've been thinking, they should make pants and skirts for women like they do for little boys. You know, the ones with the elastic and the buttons on the inside so if they don't quite fit around the waist but they fit perfectly around the legs and hips, you can still ACTUALLY GET a pair of pants.

Your adventure clearly demonstrates the burden of women shopping for clothes. "Well, I wear a 14 here but a 22 there" whereas men walk in and say 34x34 and they put the frickin pants on and there it is. They look fabulous. If there is one thing my mother taught me, it's that life is not fair and even less fair when it comes to buying or trying on clothes.