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HOLLENBECK: Fashion faux pas |
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Tuesday, 05 February 2008 |
A flaxen-haired co-worker who shall remain nameless came to work in distress the other day. If her clothes were an indicator — and one’s clothes usually are — she had lost an appreciable amount of weight in a relatively short time. Less than a week to be precise.
“Look at this!” she exclaimed while pulling out the waist of her jeans, which were so big that they required yanking up in length, too.
“I don’t know what’s wrong,” she moaned. “I hope I’m not sick. I know I’ve been under stress, but I shouldn’t have lost this much weight this quickly.”
She worried silently for the rest of the morning.
When she returned to the office after a lunch break, there was a huge smile on her face as she confessed her blunder.
“I really haven’t lost weight,” she said. “I showed my son how big my pants were and he told me, ‘Uh, Mom, I think those are my jeans, not yours.”
“It was such a relief,” flaxen-haired co-worker said. “I thought I had a terrible disease.”
Anyone can make a mistake.
When I heard the tale of the traveling pants, I shared a similar incident from my not-so-distant past.
In my assortment of black pants — the staple of any woman’s wardrobe and without which I would be lost — there are two pairs that are alike, except for one minor difference: the placement of the zippers. In one, the zipper is in the front; in the other, the zipper is in the back. Otherwise, they’re identical — same brand, same style, same size, same fabric.
Trust me when I say what would be considered a minor difference quickly can become major if you turn them the wrong way. And I did.
I started to zip my pants into place when I was stopped cold. There was a huge gap where I should have been able to zip the two sides together.
Immediately I started perspiring — and I don’t actually perspire. I sweat. A lot.
I was acutely aware I had tried on the pants the day before when I was assessing clothing and had actually worn them a short time before. I thought I was suddenly in the Twilight Zone and had gone to bed one size and awakened the next morning 20 pounds heavier.
“Something is wrong here,” I said to myself. “These pants fit perfectly yesterday.”
After a couple of minutes it was obvious that I couldn’t wear the pants, so I took them off and tossed them onto the bed. Thankfully, before searching for something else to wear, I saw the grave error I had made: I was trying to back-zip the front-zip pair.
Knowledge can a wonderful healer, I found out. I instantly felt better knowing I hadn’t had such a fattening dream.
Clothing crises can send a woman over the edge pretty quickly. One of the worst I ever had when I, as a young woman, was attending a state music club convention in Little Rock.
I was living in Cotton Plant at the time. The convention included daytime meetings and an evening banquet which necessitated formal wear. Only one of our delegates was staying overnight and those of us who had driven over for the day left our evening attire in her room and were planning to change for the banquet there.
As I am wont to do and life dictates, there was little time to make the clothing transition. But I thought I had sufficient time to go from my day wear, which was a silver and white dress that I wore with light grey pantyhose, to my night wear, which was a chocolate brown crepe frock worn with matching brown hosiery.
Trust me when I say that the legwear for neither dress could be switched to wear with the other. Doing so wouldn’t have been just non-chic; it would have been downright tasteless.
I got out of the daytime clothes and into the cocktail dress in short order. I thought everything was fine until I opened the pantyhose package and started to pull them on. They wouldn’t go any farther than just above my knees.
They were marked with my correct size, but obviously this was a mis-sized pair. All the stretching in the world wouldn’t get them past the point they stopped and there was no time to buy another pair, nor was there a place anywhere nearby where I could have done so if there had been five additional minutes, which there wasn’t.
My only option was to wear the extra-short hose and walk very carefully, with my knees practically touching. And I had to sit sedately throughout the event. This wasn’t the get-up to wear to work the room.
To say I was miserable doesn’t even come close. I was terrified that at any moment the hose were going to fall down around my ankles and I’d look like Mama on “Mama’s Family.”
Oh, I’ve left out one teeny detail here: I was about seven months’ pregnant with my third child. That condition only enhanced my misery and potential embarrassment.
Someone reading this might wonder why I just didn’t decide to go barelegged, skipping the hosiery altogether. Young women today frequently omit the legwear and some look fine. (Others don’t, but that’s a whole other story.)
This wouldn’t be an option for me today and it certainly wasn’t then. At that juncture, NO ONE would have gone barelegged to a formal event, and there’s also the fact that I’m a redhead and my legs are as white as the driven snow. These legs in a dark brown cocktail dress with high-heeled evening sandals would have qualified me for a spot on the tacky hour.
Wish I could have called on my flaxen-haired co-worker to borrow a little extra fabric. I surely could have used it.
Lynda Hollenbeck is associate editor of the Courier.
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