Refashioning for Weight Gain 1: Change your clothes not your body
12.15.2019
“We are organic creatures, we grow without supervision.”
—She’s All Fat Podcast, Episode “Seams Fake, But Okay”
When I first started sewing, I started with refashioning. I’d go to a thrift store, find items with potential—an oversized men’s shirt that would make a cool dress, or a dress that would be cuter as a top—and alter and repurpose them. At the time it was a low barrier way in to sewing. I was clueless about fit, fabric, and patterns, so starting from something was much easier than starting from scratch. I liked it for sustainability reasons as well. As I got more into it, refashioning unexpectedly began to shift how I thought about my body as well. Looking in the fitting room mirror and looking for the potential to rework a product of some other designer’s decisions felt very different from looking in a fitting room mirror and seeing a body that was a lost cause. I’ve become more competent at sewing in the last couple years, and my refashioning practice fell away as I began to make myself exactly what I wanted from scratch.
Then, a few months ago I found myself pulling items out of my closet that were suddenly too tight. My clothes delivered the news I’d gained weight, and my reaction was intense, negative, and totally incompatible with my values. By then I knew how to think and talk about the weaponization of beauty standards against women. I knew what fat-phobia was and that I wanted to resist it. I knew that we all deserve better than to waste our lives obsessing over food and wishing ourselves smaller. I knew all this, but that didn’t stop my panicked calculation of how long I might need to diet to get myself back into those clothes.
And even beneath all that I knew an even sadder truth: I didn’t even like my body when those now-too-tight clothes fit me. Even if I ignored my feminist critique, managed to resist my unruly appetite, and somehow beat the odds that say >95% of dieters gain back all the weight they’ve lost and more within 5 years, and I could somehow get myself back to the size I was when those clothes fit, I wouldn’t be satisfied then either.
I needed to find a new way to respond when I encountered my changed body. If I couldn’t control my body, I figured I could at least use my sewing skills to exert more control over how I dress it, and I definitely didn’t want to have too-small clothes hanging around in my closet making me feel bad.
In the pile of too small things was one of my first and favorite me-made dresses: my beloved dinosaur dress. When I think about how sewing has impacted my body image and self esteem, I think back to a shabbat dinner where I wore this dress, shortly after I made it. I got a number of compliments on the dress, and responded repeatedly with “thanks, I made it.” That was the first time that I felt a boost to my self-esteem and confidence, not because my body looked different, or because what I was wearing was especially flattering or especially fashionable, but because I’d made it and it was uniquely and delightfully mine. This dress is symbolic of the beginning of my love for sewing and the origin of my understanding that sewing could shift how I feel about my body.
It had the quality of a very first project (that is to say, not a lot), but I really loved it anyway, and couldn’t stand the idea of throwing it away. It isn’t fun to realize I’ve out grown some random ready to wear thing, but finding a me-made too small was downright devastating. The last thing I want is for sewing to make me even more resistant to body change. I decided I’d return to refashioning with the goal of finding a way to make that very special dress wearable again, and to give myself a much needed reminder that I don’t have to change my body to fit clothes, rather I can change the clothes to fit my body, even as my body continues to change over time.
For many of us when we gain weight we feel urged to punish, deprive, and discipline ourselves. In this series of posts, I’m exploring how I set out to approach refashioning clothes that are too small with feelings of compassion, abundance and creativity instead—and the slightly more complicated experience I encountered when I did.
» Next post: Sometimes our crafts defy our control as much as our bodies do