I’ve been meaning to write this blog post for a long time. About how frustrating and humiliating it is to shop for clothing as a mid-sized woman. The topic feels impossibly huge in our fat phobic culture. But yesterday I had the distinct pleasure of experiencing these feelings once again for the first time in a long time, in a real life brick and mortar store, and not just in the privacy of my own bedroom, so here goes nothing.
I have to go to federal court on Thursday in person(!) for the first time in… 5-ish years(?), which means I need to buy a new suit in a hurry (I’m covering this appearance for a colleague who usually handles our company’s litigation matters.)
Many people don’t know just how conservative the federal court dress code is for women lawyers.
- There are 3 acceptable colors: black, navy, gray. Just like Barack Obama, we can’t wear tan.
- You’re often told that you can’t wear pants because many of the judges on the federal bench are so old they don’t think it’s appropriate for a woman to wear them: yet another way lifetime tenure fucks over women.
- A friend was recently reduced to tears because she suddenly had to argue while recovering from a foot injury which meant it was incredibly painful to wear the required high heeled pumps. Members of the 9th Circuit were once forced to weigh on whether open toed shoes were allowed in their court.
… and that’s just the basics. The rules of corporate law dress are so complex and convoluted that there’s even a very popular, very judgmental, but very necessary blog to help women to navigate its arcane requirements.
It’s no wonder that women lawyers choose stick together: you can’t get into trouble wearing what everyone else is wearing. For many of us that means wearing Theory suits exclusively. They’re expensive but not absurdly expensive. They come as mix-and-match separates. Over the years I spent as a BigLaw litigator, I assembled my very own collection.
When I went to work for a tech company (what’s called “in-house”), and started hiring outside counsel to appear in court on my company’s behalf, I gave away my suits to Dress for Success. Plus, the pandemic gave us remote court, which I managed pretty well in a blouse + a more casual blazer over sweatpants, not even once appearing as a cat, as much as I wanted to.
But this appearance is in person, and it’s an important one, so even though I won’t be the one arguing, off to Nordstrom I went.
You would think that after wearing Theory for 15+ years, I could just order a couple things online and make do with express shipping. But that’s not so easy: I’ve bought identical jackets from them a couple of years apart, and the one that was marked a larger size was actually smaller than the smaller labeled one. 🤷🏻♀️
Yes, I could have ordered multiple sizes and returned what didn’t fit, but I wanted to try on several different styles, and avoid the waste: many retailers never resell their returns which end up in illegal landfills in the global South.
Add to this the fact that I’m a 38DDD (didn’t buy ‘em, wish I could return them without major surgery). This means that very few suit jackets fit me across the shoulders, the chest and the waist simultaneously. I’m also consistently a different size between suit tops and bottoms.
This is all annoying enough, but Theory sees itself as “designer-adjacent” which means their clothing runs smaller than you would expect for a similar size at a “fashion” retailer where I’ve been buying my clothes most recently, and they don’t make some items beyond (their smaller than usual) size 16, which is coincidentally the size of the average US woman (and yours truly, in some brands.)
Now I’m not an idiot, and I’ve lived in this body for some time. So I checked what Nordstrom had in-store and sighed with reserved relief that they seemed to have the full size range of the items I wanted to try on. This is not guaranteed: Many “straight size” stores don’t stock above a size 12, and fashionable stores in New York City often only stock through size 6 (ask me how I know).
I also didn’t pre-order for pick up because again, I wanted to try before I bought, and Nordstrom all but killed its once-great personal shopper service so I couldn’t ask someone to pull clothing for me in advance.
So. I showed up. I found the Theory rack in the back corner between true designer apparel and its more reasonably priced cousins. I flipped through the rack: 0, 0, 2, 2, 2, 4, 4, 6, 6, 6, 10. That’s it. I discreetly checked the website on my phone and saw that the store was supposed to have these items in stock in the larger sizes.
I found a sales associate. To her credit, she didn’t blink and soon came back with two jackets and a pair of pants adjacent to my size. Why were they in the back when the rack contained only smaller sizes? If I were shopping casually I would have assumed the item either didn’t come in that size, or was sold out. I wouldn’t have asked for it: do you know how humiliating it is to ask a naturally thin sales associate for a larger size, when the odds are she’ll tilt her head to the side and condescendingly draw out a “noooooo” that also includes an unspoken “I’m sorry you’re so fat”? It’s like they don’t work on commission or something.
I took them into the dressing room. The pants were a bit large, but they didn’t have them one size smaller. The jacket buttoned but is a looser style I don’t particularly like. Still. I bought them because I need something to put on my body Thursday morning. I will probably just keep the tags on so I can return them after my court appearance. This is really shitty and I’ve never done that before. But I spent $600 on two pieces of clothing I don’t even like that much because they were literally the only things that fit in a whole enormous suburban department store so I don’t feel too badly about it.
Larger women exist, and we have money to spend, but clothing manufacturers refuse to make clothing for us, and when they do, they make far fewer items in our sizes. This is especially true at the higher end of the market. But when Dolce & Gabbana made plus size versions of their line one season, I watched $3,000 (not a typo) pants sell out in literal minutes on the website that offered them.
That’s why when you see larger successful well-dressed women in public, they’re often wearing made-to-measure clothing, not because they can, because they have to. I belong to several online groups where women resell their used but quality plus size clothing for nearly full price because it’s so rare!
It doesn’t have to be like this. And it doesn’t even have to be in service of “size inclusivity” or other lofty goals: it would literally be more profitable. There are *more* of us than the size 6s. We have money. We want to spend it. Which makes me believe that what I experience in stores is nothing but the internalized fat phobia of people in the fashion business who decide not just what the rest of us should wear, but what size our bodies should be. I’m looking at you, real-life Miranda Priestlies.
There’s so much more to say about this topic. How I don’t even have it that bad as a “mid-size” woman: my options are waaaaay better than those of my plus size comrades. How this impacts trans women who tend to be taller and have different body shapes than cis women. How Ozempic is sure to make this experience that much more toxic (you should read Dr. McMillan Cottom on this instead).
But I’m tired and I have a court appearance to prepare for.
