From the vault: why is flattering the priority?

Not to toot my own horn or anything, but I've been talking about this for YEARS. This blog is a repost from 2020, and here's a blog post from almost seven (!) years ago with the same message. My ideas continue to evolve on this, so I put some newer thoughts in italics.

Why is "flattering" the priority for our clothing? What does that even mean? I heard Stacy London (of What Not to Wear fame) say recently on a podcast that your personal style should be defined by what looks best on your body. To her credit, she’s evolved a lot since her WNTW days, but I respectfully and totally disagree. Should the shape of our body determine which style of clothes we’re able to wear? Absolutely not.

When we define our style, we need to figure out what we are drawn to aesthetically, separate from what “works” for our body or even our lifestyle. We just want to figure out what we love the look of and then figure out how we can make that work for us. 

If your body is shaped a certain way, does that mean you have to wear certain things regardless of what you like aesthetically? That’s bonkers to me. Your body doesn’t determine anything about your life or your tastes or your preferences or what you do with yourself (note: it shouldn’t determine any of those things, but today I have more of an awareness of the way fatphobia *does* affect these things). It shouldn’t determine only what kind of clothes you wear (again, access prevents this in many cases).

I’ll give you a quick example. For women who are smaller on top and larger on bottom, the conventional wisdom is to say they have a pear shaped body and that they should wear clothes that are fitted through the top, have defined waist, and then fuller skirts that will flow over that offensive (sarcasm) larger half of their body. 

That’s all well and good if you have a feminine, retro, girly style and you want to wear defined waist, full skirted articles of clothing. But what if you don’t? What if you’d like to wear oversized, architecturally structured, avant-garde pieces of fashion? 

Should you not be allowed to wear what you like because your style isn’t lining up with what would be considered flattering on your body? Of course not. The whole idea is equally ludicrous and infuriating. It makes me think about what flattering means and why we value it so highly. If you really dig down to the unspoken meaning, I think flattering means to appear as small as possible. And flattering clothes are ones that facilitate our looking smaller than we really are (I’ve always gotten pushback to this, but to me, this is the most common usage. Yes, flattering can be something that just suits someone or makes them look happy, but most of the time, people are using the word to reference how the size of the body appears). It’s time to let go of that goal. 

Can we take up the space that we actually take up in the world without trying to create an optical illusion that hides part of us? It frustrates me when people prioritize flattering over everything else (again, acknowledging the oppressive systems in place that make that unsafe for some). What is most important in your clothing is items that you like the look of, that you like the style of, that you feel good in, without worrying that you're going to offend someone by taking up space.

What does “flattering” mean to you?

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