Article originally posted on EGO Magazine
By Piyali Bhattacharya
I’m inviting about 30 people to my house for New Year’s Eve. They are mostly old college friends and their new partners, people I’ve known and loved for years and the people they now love. Since I haven’t seen most of them in a while and I’m meeting some for the first time, I’ve already started to think about potential outfits. But when I went to inspect the choices, the confines of my closet seemed to be closing in around me and I found myself at the ever-unchanging crossroads of “I’ve already worn that” and “I have nothing to wear.” The only thing left to do was to go to Macy’s armed with a 20% off voucher.
When I made my way to the fitting room with a handful of selections, I was unsurprisingly underwhelmed. Let me explain: I’m a 5’8” Bengali woman, which in most parts of India makes me an Amazon. Couple that with the fact that I’m generally an American size 10 (and a British size 12, which in most haute couture boutiques might as well be a size 80,000) and you’ve got a case of body image issues just waiting to happen. Pants? Tight at the hip and short at the ankle. Skirts? Flare in all the wrong places. Sweaters? Short and bulgy. Let’s not even get started on blazers and jackets. So what on earth is a girl like me supposed to wear?
To set the record straight, I don’t hate myself nor do I find myself obese. But I have to admit that the overpowering stereotype about Desi girls my age in this country is that they are short, petite and extremely slim. In the face of that, it’s hard to love my tall, curvy figure at all times, especially when I’m staring into a fitting room mirror and the clothes staring back are telling me that my body is not made for them. Funny, isn’t it… I thought clothes were supposed to be made for bodies, not the other way around?
When I look around me, most of the diasporic Desi girls I see have perfect straight, black hair, perfect arms for tank tops and perfect legs for skinny jeans. Maybe in response to this, I went through a college phase of wearing almost exclusively Indian clothing. I found nothing suited my body more. Kurtas draped over jeans, hiding all of my (what I considered) flaws, saris cascaded elegantly off my shoulder and showed off the best parts of my body on special occasions. The kurta-and-jeans look is how people knew me around campus, and I felt I had such a range of fabrics, styles and prints to work with.
I loved that style and I still do. But let’s face it. I can’t dress that way for a board meeting at my work place. And let’s also face the bigger issue: at that age I often felt people weren’t interested in me because of my body. Whether that was a construction of my own imagination, or whether it was because people I might have been interested in genuinely were looking for a smaller model of me, I’ll never know. But I can tell you that tall women intimidate the hell out of men in a way that shorter women probably don’t. And I can also tell you that I’ll almost never find something that might suit me for a New Year’s Eve party at Macy’s.
I don’t know what the solutions to these dilemmas are. How do tall, size-10-and-over South Asian women find places to dress themselves in this country? Not only are we not the right size, but our body shapes are more Desi than they are Caucasian, so the styles and cuts of most clothes are exactly wrong for us. What do we wear to show off our full height and still look our own age? How do we deal with potential rejection because we’re not typically 5’2” and 100 lbs.?
The way I have dealt with these things so far is to try and be as confident in myself as possible. If that means scouring every rack of every department store until I find the one skirt that’s long enough, then that’s what I do. If it means ending a night out with friends by going home, looking at my reflection in the mirror and naming all the things I like about myself, I do that. But I will admit that it’s not always easy. And I’ll also admit that for now, my back up plan for a New Year’s outfit is a sari.
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