RetroXotique

In order to answer this question, I went down into the depths of the New York Public Library, where I discovered a treasure trove of old Vogue magazines. I suspect they're all on microfiche today, but twenty years ago you could look at the actual copies, turn the pages and even sniff them, and be transported back in time.

The magazines that were published around the turn of the century seemed pretty alien, since they portrayed women's bodies in an artistically distorted manner. Even in the age of corsets, no one ever had tiny little waists like that. Then fashion photography came in, so they had to find models with distorted bodies instead. It's amazing to realize that it hasn't always been fashionable to be skinny. Sometimes I used to yearn to go back to the turn of the century, when voluptuous New York beauty like Lillian Russell took part in eating contests with her lover Diamond Jim Brady. Every date included a stop at the soda fountain for ice cream. As these ladies spooned up the calories and put on more curves, they were sexier than ever to the men they were with. Those gals relied on corsets to create their hourglass figures. These contraptions pushed the fat to where it would do the most good, producing larger breasts or a natural bustle—not that I would want to be encased in such an instrument of torture today.

The twenties was the beginning of fashion photography, and I was surprised to find that the figures on flappers were not as boyish as I’d expected them to be. There were definitely some thunder thighs around in those days. Also, no one ever seemed to wear ordinary clothes. This was before the concept of sportswear came into existence, and I suspect that the kinds of things women wore every day then were just as boring as my daily dress is today. My goal for daytime dressing is to find something that looks decent with sneakers, and I don't always succeed.

Magazines from the thirties weren't much too look at—they mostly featured movie stars in fancy gowns, like In Style does today, with no indication of what the average woman was wearing. This was undoubtedly because the average woman could no longer afford to buy clothes.

The era that interested me most was the forties. There I saw something that amazed me: ads revealed that a particular style was available in several different size ranges, so that everyone, fat or thin, could wear the same dress! This is unheard of today, when even designers that make clothes for both misses and women’s sizes seem to think they have to design special clothes for fat ladies, rather than simply make their clothes larger. It’s like being singled out for having to wear braces or orthopedic shoes.

I also read about the "half sizes." I'm still not sure what these are, since they've been superceded by sizes 1X, 2X, etc., which are kinder ways of indicating 18, 20 and up. I think it might be a size range for women without much torso. Models always look like someone grabbed them at both ends of their bodies and s-t-r-e-t-c-h-e-d. Their torsos are extra long and so are their thighs.

The bad times for fatties started in the 50s with Dior's New Look. This was when the tiny waist returned, accompanied by boobs so pointy that your breasts arrived in the room before you did. Major underwear was again a necessity. Bras, waist- cinchers and girdles that reached to the knees were the kind of underpinnings needed in order to get into those styles.

Then came the 60s, and at first it felt great to get out of the corsets and into embroidered peasant dresses and sandals. Don’t let mini skirts fool you: there were many zaftig women around then, probably due to the "marijuana munchies."

But soon Twiggy came along and spoiled everything. She was so incredibly skinny that she made everyone else look fat, causing the entire Western world to immediately go on a diet—and most of us are still on it. Clothes were designed to look good only on bodies without an once of fat. Everything was skimpy, and clothes barely buttoned.

Meanwhile, fashion photography soared to new heights of artistic silliness. Black women wearing black clothes were photographed at night against dark backdrops. Women in expensive couture dresses were photographed riding elephants instead of eating in expensive restaurants. You could barely tell what was being worn. The whole point was to let the photographer express himself.

That was the last straw for many of us, when it came to clothes. We couldn't wear the new styles or afford them, and now we couldn't even see them. Fashion, with its long lists of Dos and Don'ts, suddenly became irrelevant.

The seventies tried to woo us back with truly bad ideas like the jumpsuit. Who wants to have to undress in order to pee?—especially in the tiny stalls of your typical ladies room.

I can't even remember the 80s, the clothes were so boring, and the 90s weren't much better. The only good thing about that era was that fat women were finally able to buy clothes.

I knew fat women who never really bought any clothes before the 90s. They would find saris in ethnic shops, or get lucky and find something that was made Extra Large or even make it themselves. Some of them got a dressmaker or learned to knit or wore the same 2 outfits over and over again.

Sophisticated women have always shopped abroad, although it's tough trying to decipher laundry instructions in another language. Those so-called "universal" symbols don't help much, either.

I have recently purchased a pair of retro-patterned pants in lime green. Most people tell me I look good in them, but they're probably just being nice. Most of the time I manage to keep a firm grip on my wallet and walk on by. Occasionally I weaken, and I usually comb through my closet and bag up these rejects once or twice a year and take them to Goodwill.

There's no use talking about clothes without taking on the subject of underwear. When I was a kid, adolescent boys leafed through copies of National Geographic, in hopes of seeing photos of topless females. When I was an teenager, I leafed through Sears catalogs, fascinated, yet horrified, by the corsets in the ladies lingerie section. Would I ever have to encase myself in those rubbery suits of armor? Artist Robert Maplethorp later got into trouble for displaying sexy photographs in the National Gallery in which people were encased the same kind of thing—only these were sold in sex stores. The girdles in the Sears catalog were huge rubber-and-elastic monstrosities, fitted with clips and straps. And panels—there were panels for the tummy, the hips, the rear end. You could end up more paneled than the basement rec room. You could buy corsets that encased your entire body, so that only your head, hands and feet remained uncovered. When I was growing up, fat women went to special corset shops to be fitted with these contraptions. The goal was to achieve a totally flat silhouette in front and the "single buttock" look in back. Women were supposed to wear these contraptions with nylons that were attached by garters. No wonder Mom was always in a bad mood by the time I got home from school.

There was also an item called the Merry Widow. The name implies that this was intended for women who had outlived their husbands. They were a combination of long line bra, waist cincher and girdle, with garters attached. Or you could purchase the All-in-One, which was a Merry Widow with legs. Strap any twenty-first century woman into one of these devices, and she'll reveal every secret you want to know— you won't have to move on to the cattle prod or the water torture. Yet these horrors were actually an improvement over what women were forced to wear a century before. It's shocking when you learn what women once had to wear in order to get into their clothes. Corsets were so tight, you couldn't take a deep breath. Plastic surgery in those days didn't concentrate on getting rid of the jowls and double chin—the ultimate surgical procedure was to get rid of your lower ribs, so you could take a break from lacing up that corset. Some of these contraptions were even electrified for "health" reasons. Electricity was a new fad in those times. It lit up women's lives any many ways.

It was assumed that nineteenth century women would become "hysterical" if they were not regularly relieved of excess tension. Today doctors peddle us Prozac, but in those days, they made house calls with electric vibrators that were especially made to deal with the hysteria problem.

They would plug in the special electrical device and place it in the vicinity of the clitoris and voila—tension was relieved! No one has fun like that at their gynecologist's office anymore.

But back to Sears—they also sold bras that were incredible feats of hydraulic engineering, with a welter of straps above and wires below, all in an attempt to lift a pair of gargantuan breasts a few inches into the air. When I was a kid, I assumed these devices were part of being a woman, like menstrual cramps and hair spray. I changed my mind when I was a college student in the 60s and women began burning their bras and advocating free sex. I was all for the free sex part, but I was too busty to give up my bras and this made me feel guilty. I'd been wearing bras for so many years by that time that they felt like a second skin. As they increase in cup size, fat women discover something that their thin, bra-burning girlfriends never experience: the curse of underwires. Once you get past a C cup, elastic alone won't do the job anymore, so manufacturers put a nice, thin little wire underneath beneath each cup, just where it can dig into your ribcage. The wires also tend to work their way out of the bra and get sucked into the holes of the clothes dryer. It once cost me $100 for a repairman to come and pull one of them out of my dryer. I'm always afraid mine are going to set off the security alarm at the airport. I'm willing to take off my shoes in public, but I refuse to remove my bra.

At one time I was determined to find a wireless bra, so I searched around for one didn't contain them. Doing this made me appreciate underwired bras for the first time. When I finally found one and put it on, the weight of my boobs pulled it down in front and up in back, so as the day wore on, it felt as my underwear was being sucked off my body. This could only be fixed by cinching the bra so tight that it left big red welts across my middle. Also, wireless bras all seemed to have been designed in 1952, with cups that pointed straight ahead like inverted ice cream cones. No matter where you were going, your boobs got there first.

For some reason, I could never seem to completely fill out those cups, maybe because my boobs are not cone-shaped. This meant that the cups remained empty at the tips, so that I could poke them in with my fingers. If I was wearing a sweater, I would sometimes go to the ladies room and notice that they had become poked in all by themselves, giving me a very odd silhouette.

So I gave up and now I wear the wires. I did draw the line at a girdle, however. I see absolutely no need for one of those torture devices. One of the reasons we no longer have to wear girdles is because we no longer need garters to hook up our stockings. I'll bet that women under 40 don't even know what garters are.

Panty hose, like VCRs and microwave ovens, are one of the truly great modern inventions. They do have a few drawbacks, however, the main one being that if you get a hole in one leg, you have to throw out the entire item. Like everything else, the manufacturers of panty hose at first didn't seem to realize that fat women existed. They would buy the largest sizes in the store, struggle to put them on, then stand up and watch them slowly slide back down their bodies onto the floor. Finally, Queen Size pantyhose came along, and the struggle ended.

Single girls, who may find themselves unexpectedly disrobing in a handsome man's bedroom, are the ones who care most about sexy underwear. For the rest of us, what matters most is that it's clean, because we remember how our moms warned us about getting into an auto accident while wearing dirty underwear.

Some singles I know have two complete wardrobes of underwear: pre-sex and everyday. Imagine the disillusion that awaits their future husbands when they discover the everyday stuff, which is nothing like the tiny thongs they wear on dates.