The Conundrum of Readymade Clothes
Readymade clothes are a simple fact of everyday shopping in our lives. It is so normalized that we think of our bodies in sizes that we know (somewhere in a far corner of our brains) are not accurate. A poor woman in Bangladesh stitches a pair of pants, attaches a tag provided and sends it off to a customer hundreds of miles away. The idea that you can stitch clothes for a client that you never measured and you will never meet is a Western miracle.
An alternate reality - I grew up in the 70’s in a tiny town in India where all clothes were tailored. A good tailor was priceless in the community. My mother herself was a good seamstress but there came a time when I had my own ideas about the clothes I wanted to wear. So we bought the cloth from one of the stores that stocked bolts of material , took it to the tailor who measured you and did the sewing and sometimes, elaborate embroidery as well. Labour was cheap. Sometimes a tailor simply had a sewing machine parked on the roadside and stitched clothes really fast while the weather permitted. No overhead expenses ! I had no expectation that clothes stitched to my measurements would fit anyone else in the world. Were there comparisons of beauty and good looks? Did families and friends talk about what was good-looking? Absolutely. However, there were no formulas about what one could do ( calorie counting and diets and sit-ups) and the very idea that one could tailor one’s body ( instead of the clothes) was not a common way of thought. You simply had to live in the body you had and tailored clothes to its idiosyncratic size. And if you had a very smart tailor, he could make the material ‘fall’ well around you.
Tailoring the clothes vs. tailoring the body. I wore tailored clothes well into my 30s when I came into contact with ready-made clothes. The first time I tried on a pair of pants I was stunned that they fit me! I was new to sizes and they meant nothing to me. That somebody could standardize the human body was astonishing. But later as I started working in the world of eating disorders, I started seeing the dark underbelly of this process. The standardizing of clothes that focuses on sales and marketing implicitly suggests that bodies need to adjust to the clothes rather than clothes adjusting to bodies. It absolutely took attention away from the subjective nature of the bodies we live in and the changes they adjust to, in life. Puberty, maturation, pregnancy, surgeries, deaths, losses and old age. It added to the world of numbers and gave us another way to tabulate and quantify our worthiness. I recently realized that India does not have a Food Guide. I doubt that any old country with a tradition of cooking has a Food Guide. It doesn’t mean that everyone eats perfectly. It simply means that when people have a way of cooking and eating and a relationship to food as just “food” , there is no way and need to quantify and make a table. Life and the body are fluid and complex and changeable. The West has discovered that anxiety and numbers improves sales. Canada and the United States are countries populated by generations of immigrants. Was the creation of the Food Guide a way to cope with the loss of grandmothers and their simple ways of throwing things together in a pot and making a meal? Numbers do not resolve anxiety, they simply give anxiety something to hold on to and those numbers can be manipulated into successful marketing. Marketing for creams, clothes, exercise and body control in all ways. The unquestioning reliance on numbers reaches its pinnacle in te anxiety of eating disorders. If only I fit into the numbers, I would be - safe, healthy, fine, equal, worthy of care, worthy enough to be seen, good enough.
How does one live without numbers? No sizes, no counting, no food guide. How would one know what to eat without counting calories, cross-checking and comparing? Perhaps one would consult one’s own particular body, listen to the cues, eat when hungry and stop when full, eat satisfying meals and learn that the body takes care of the food in its own complex way. Perhaps one could learn that a healthy well-functioning alimentary canal helps one feel ‘happy’ in one’s body. Good hunger, good gut health, good poop. Happy bones, happy heart health, happy joints. All the parts that get ignored to fit into clothes that are a certain size and eat a certain number of calories. The less one lives in one’s body, the less harmonious that relationship, the less sustainable any “happiness” will be.
I appreciate that “trusting” the self that is housed in the body takes a long time and supported ‘growing up’. This is separate work. What nobody tells us is that “growing up” often happens in our 30s and 40s, not so much in our teens. After a lot of trying, we realize that any number of calories and sizes do not give us sustainable peace in the body. Shortcomings in emotional and mental peace and stability is also felt in the body and contributes to the unrestful feelings that we call “anxiety and depression”. One thing cannot be fixed with the other. In this case too, substitution does not work. Emotional work requires emotional support. There are no perfect parents and therefore , no perfect children. Everybody can benefit from some repair. As we get older and look around and acknowledge this fact, we can grow into peace with our unique bodies and life stories and finally “fit into” society in our own brilliant unique ways.
