Breaking the Rules

Fashion is sort of an interesting thing. Everyone has to be at least somewhat invested in it because, well, you have to put on clothes. But there are varying degrees of how much you can care about it.

You can buy clothes that are on trend, or not.

You can subscribe to the rules, like not wearing white after Labor Day, or not.

You can legitimately believe that putting on a nice outfit improves your mood, or not.

One of the few fashion truisms that I always subscribed to was that everyone is either a stripes person or a polka dots person. Maybe you can be neither, but certainly never both. Which was perfectly fine with me, because I always hated stripes. Yuck. Ugly.

Mostly, the reason I hated stripes was because I'm not supposed to wear them. You know, because I'm not a size zero.

This is, quite literally, the first thing that anyone whose opinion you ask and anyone whose opinion you DON'T ask will tell you about how to dress when you wear a 2-digit size. "Horizontal stripes make you look wide."

Alright, fine. Like every woman with soul-crippling body image issues (which I'm pretty sure is most women, thanks, society!), I would like to not look wider than I am.

Despite my love of polka dots, in 2006 I bought a striped shirt that was 2 different shades of green. I really liked it, and it was a weird fluke of fashion-sense-nature that I liked it because I was still totally a polka dots person.

See? Here I am in my polka dots, standing on a skeeball machine because I wanted to take a picture of my awesome score but I didn't get a chance to before the machine reset, and now I have no proof that I seriously got like, 5 balls in the 100 pocket. Would I have been able to accomplish this in stripes? "Probably not!" most women's magazines might say.

Around a year ago, I bought this sweater from Old Navy. I'm obsessed with it. If you could see the whole thing you might argue that it's not really striped so much as CHEVRON, but, you know. It's striped.

In the last 6 or so years, I have accumulated a fairly ridiculous number of polka dot dresses. And then this summer, this happened:

I bought a striped dress! A striped maxi dress, no less. It's pretty great. But despite that tweet, I still felt a little weird about it. Like, when I walk down the street are people going to whisper, "That girl is way too big to be wearing *GASP* stripes!"

In the last week, I've done a lot of shopping. It was supposed to be so I could get new clothes to wear to my NEW JOB, but some casual things may or may not have made their way home with me as well.

And you know what? A lot of what I bought has polka dots on it. But a lot of what I bought has stripes on it, too. ALL of the striped things are striped horizontally.

I say this unapologetically, despite the fact that every time a heavy girl wears stripes, a Marie Claire intern gets fired. I say this unapologetically because how many times do I have to feel guilty about putting a fucking shirt on before I realize that I CAN WEAR WHATEVER I WANT TO. And not in the sense that I have the right to wear something that I like even if it looks terrible on me (which I do), but in that I have the right to look good in something that I'm not "supposed" to look good in. Because really, who made these rules? Aren't we supposed to shy away from making sweeping generalizations? There are people who are my size who look completely different in their clothes than I would. There are people who weigh far less than I do who would look terrible in outfits that look great on me.

So I'm done with these rules. I'm declaring my love of both polka dots AND stripes. And you can't stop me.

 

**This is my new series called Stratejoy Monday. To learn more about all this goodness, see the first 5 months of my Stratejoy journey here.