Wide legged jeans! I can honestly say I never though I'd see the day when I gave up my skinnies. Well, I haven't at all really, but with the 70s silouhettes I'm loving for the summer I wanted another option to wear with my luxurious flowing tops (and because I love dressing like a 70s nerd, complete with flares, big glasses and a tank top. Ohhhh yes.). Dorothy Perkins have £5 off all their jeans in store and online at the minute, and after the style I wanted sold out online but appeared in a branch local to where I work, I jumped on them. These are a size 20/short fitting, which is particularly odd given that I am neither a size 20 or particularly short at 5'9"! I wore this to travel to another archive to prepare some nitrate film for scanning, which is hazardous and potentially explosive, so needless to say I was dressed for comfort and ease above anything else.Jumper, £3, charity shop
Belt, old vintage stock
Wide leg jeans, £21, Dorothy Perkins
Dunlops, £2, car boot sale
Duffel coat, £12.50, River Island sale (though it was way too hot for this in the end! Yay for sunny weather!)
Also, on a related note I wanted to say how awesome I thought this post on Corpulent was. There is a tension, I feel, in the fatosphere about posting casual outfits. As I have moved back to embracing wider legs and baggier silouhettes, I'm really interested in this debate. Is dressing up a comment on our bodies as inferior when dressed down? Obviously as a person who overdresses frequently, I don't believe this is true (I do it for many other reasons though - to amuse myself, sometimes to engender responses from others and mainly to feel fantastic in myself), however I do feel that there is a pressure on fat bloggers to dress up. This is certainly connected to the stereotype of the fat slob in jeans and tracksuits. It's a tricky balance to strike - by posting pictures of ourselves dressed up, we are refuting this stereotype, but, at the same time, I don't believe that as a fat person, I should be obligated to dress up in order to make my body acceptable or attractive to people who wouldn't otherwise deem it so. Jeans and t-shirts can look amazing on any body, and neither should cultural implications of a particular style of dress make you avoid such clothing. This is why I enjoyed fatshion february so much - it presented images of fat femmes on both up and down days - I felt like it was more of a representation of lived experiences in clothing than more formal blogs.
I post the outfits I wear most days - mainly otherwise they're repeats, hideous mistakes or else I'm sat in my pajamas! This blog is about everyday dressing for me - that's why my photographs and editing are haphazard, and why I sometimes don't post huge chunks of text. I would rather there were lots of outfits updated regularly, which show how I live and what I live in as a fat woman, than more formal photoshoots (though I like these on other blogs also, it's just a personal preference).
I'm always faffing on about this, but the only person I believe you should dress for (as a fat person or otherwise) is yourself. Dressing for me is a way of showing that I like my body, and before that, a strategy of acceptance. Don't dress to make anyone else happy! Wear something that makes you feel fantastic, that you love, and that fits you as well as is possible, and that you feel comfortable in. This could be jeans and a t-shirt or it could be a sequinned ballgown! I feel that wearing the right clothes for you (whatever it may be, regardless of fashion, cultural implications as a fat person or any other social pressures) is one of the most amazing things to do along the way to self acceptance and love.
