the anti-fashion project

I’ve been going on about it for years but I’m doing it now. Honest. Sick to death of the fashion industry’s lack of concern for any but the adolescent and/or “perfectly” formed (see various posts on the subject over the years: It’snotharddrawingthinpipple, It’s time I faced it, Why I hate fashion designers, Sell me stuff, Fashion designers are vacuous idiots, Good things for the summer) I’m doing a project. Yes.

The problem

I’m fed up with being made to feel like a worthless member of the world by the fashion industry (I’m not worthless.  I’m brilliant). This sounds a little extreme, I know, but the reach of the fashion industry is insidious and all pervading with its ideas of beauty, thinness and desirability.  TV, press, advertising, music.

The fashion industry does not make clothes for we who don’t fit into their category of “proper woman-shaped”.  Many of us have to cram ourselves into clothes or are forced to wear ghastly blousy or tenty clothes, just because fashion labels accept little or no responsibility for the making of clothes for big breasted women, big arsed women, wide backed women, big boned women and, these days, women whose knees are hideous (mine).

If you are not “perfect”, try finding a dress (because we are lucky and can wear dresses… take THAT men) that

1. doesn’t make you bulge and crease
2. makes your big boobs look fabulous and doesn’t crush them into an amorphous shelf on your chest
3. hides your knees
4. doesn’t require your paying for a private consult from Stella McCartney

If you are successful, please let me know.  I have tried and tried and I have given up.  Maybe I’d be luckier if I lived in a huge city like London or New York, had too much time on my hands and had a lot of money,  but I don’t and most of you don’t.

Have you tried on an XL sized dress in Zara recently?  I have. Tried and failed.  Don’t get me started on their trousers.

Look at the shops that sell “outsize” clothes.  They sell mostly horrible clothes, big blousy blouses, big flowery prints, big horrible jackets that make you resemble a yurt (including the hideous short sleeved jacket… WHO invented THAT?).  Women (who don’t want to spend their life eating rice cakes) want to look like strong, elegant, attractive, interesting women, and not frilly, frou frou, flowery fools.

I’m not saying it’s impossible to ever find anything to wear, but it’s damned hard.

There must be many reasons for this failure to dress ME, some of which may be:

1. Economics: it’s cheaper to mass-produce less structured clothing with few variations between size ranges (i.e. not making “long” versions for the tall, or “rack!” versions for the well-boobed), using less cloth, less manpower, fewer design challenges.
2. Advertising & marketing: it’s hard to market something tailored for women who are “not perfect” when you’ve spent years bombarding them with images of half dead teenaged waifs in clothes, changing the supposed ideal for us silly fool women.  We imperfects, subconsciously or not, compare ourselves to the pouty-mouthed twits on hoardings and magazine covers and don’t want to admit to ourselves, subconsciously or not, that we are not, nor never will be, pouty-mouthed half-dead teenaged waifs.  Therefore, the ideal of stick-girl continues.
3. The fashion design world: fashion designers live in a world populated by six foot models…. and it is easier for the poor dears to draw and dress thin people.
4. Very few BIG women get into the glamourous limelight, because of all of the above: Only two come to mind right now; Christina Hendricks and Adele Adkins, each of them physically big in different ways, each of them absolutely bloody gorgeous. Even though they are both at the very top (CH regarded as one of the sexiest women in the world, AA singing to the world), there seems to be little trickle down effect through the industries.

The project

For now, I’m regarding this as a long-running in-my-spare-time art project.  It may end up as just me designing and making a few clothes.  It may end up with my being able to sell you something.  I’m designing a range of clothes (mostly dresses because they are the hardest thing to find for we imperfs) for non stick-people. I’m sorry, stick-people friends of mine, I love you, but you can go shopping any day of the week and find SOMETHING to wear.  This is for the rest of us. 

I’ll put my ideas, sketches and finished designs here on my website (you will find them via this page) and I am open to suggestions of influences and funny shapes that I forget to try to cater for.

I will then make a selection of these clothes in my size (i.e. me me me), make patterns from them, and photograph them (pro-photog Rob, who has already offered to do this (he’s very good, you know)…you’d better make me look good!) and then … see what happens.  My dream (and I know this is going to be the real toughie… if you have any thoughts/insights/contacts let me know) is that I could persuade a clothing label or manufacturer (we do have lots here in Portugal) to take on the designs and help me make and flog them to YOU.  If not, I will at least make the patterns available…. IF I MANAGE TO MAKE SOME NICE CLOTHES, THAT IS.

These clothes are not intended to be FASHIONABLE.  My aim is to create a collection of clothing that is stylish, classic, wearable, affordable and FLATTERING for women of any age and that can be mixed and matched to suit several unwaifish body shapes and sizes.  (as an aside:  I also have a problem with the enormous amount of waste that ever-changing fashions and super cheap clothing create… personally, I would like to own some clothes that will last, especially in these days of ever worsening austerity.)

Follow the project, by selecting my anti-fashion proj category.

If you have any suggestions or ideas relating to the anti-fashion project, do email me at: lucy *at* lucypepper *dot* com putting “anti-fashion” in the subject.