When I wear a good dress I feel like I am more than I am. I feel pretty and powerful and god damn invincible. Every girl, every person should be able to wear something that makes them feel like this, even if it’s just for a moment. The clothes we wear on our backs are often disregarded as a mere commodity for everyday life; we wear them to cover our bodies from the elements and hide from others who don’t want to particularly see all of you. These clothes aren’t often thought of as special nor expensive, they’re just clothes—but they shouldn’t be just clothes and we shouldn’t just walk around every day disregarding fashion.
Fashion is beautiful and bold, exciting in ways that we can’t put into words other than cool. Fashion is made from the minds of designers who have an eye for style and for the bodies of thin, tall light skinned women with the face of perfection. Fashion is cool, obviously, but most women aren’t six feet tall and have skeletons that are visible from the outside. Most women have bodies that carry bits of fat here and there, breasts that don’t hold up all the way, thighs that rub together with every step—bodies should look like this. The problem with fashion is that it only caters to a certain kind of girl, girls like Kate Moss and Adriana Lima. I am not that kind of girl. No one is.
That being said, fashion needs to be more inclusive of all body genres and economic standings. Fashion is too expensive and too elite. It’s for people who have the good fortune of nursing genes that make them look like goddesses and make enough money to buy a six-hundred-dollar dress and still afford to live in good neighborhood. Just because you make minimum wage does not mean that you should have to dress down from what you really want to wear. Everyone deserves to feel confident in the silhouette of their garments.
While fashion continues to stand as a conglomerate of the selected few, the business seems to be making steps toward a more inclusive market with designers like Christian Siriano who has a certain sensitivity about designing for women of all sizes. His sister is a size 2 and his mother is a 16, that’s the world he lives in, unlike the exclusive tiny model world that every other designer seems to live in. Shows like “Project Runway” have also made an effort to include diversity in their model castings by hiring girls of all sizes and ethnicities. Not only do the contestants have to work with a different body type each week but they also made it a point to tailor the fabric for each of their models tastes.
A designer who cannot alter their seams for a larger woman is out of reach with the world around them. The notion that high end fashion needs to be petite and tall is beyond lazy to the actualities of a woman’s body. We should demand more from fashion, we should demand more from these designers who think clothes are a one size fits all because quite frankly, that is never the case.