Clothes Horse

I've never been much of a clothes horse, which I learned today has two definitions according to Merriam Webster. The first definition that I'm familiar with refers to a clothes horse as someone who is conspicuously dressed - or as I like to think, someone who's obsessed with clothing. The other type of clothes horse refers to the photo below.

A place to hang clothes, which I DO have in my possession but mine is made of metal and is painted white.

Anyhow, what I want to talk about are clothes itself and what I actually saw on the shelf in a store awhile back.

I've never been a clothes horse. As a kid growing up in the late seventies and early eighties with an older sister, most of my clothes were hand-me-downs and stuff that should never leave that time era. Bell bottoms? We had them. Zip up pants legs? We had them. Shoulder pads? I hated them and took great pleasure putting a pair of scissors to those dreadful things. Richard Simmons gym shorts? Yeah, I wore those too. And I wore them out to the grocery store. Sigh...

So my idea of fashion style never made it past the 90's. But my "ideals" of fashion remained. This meant wearing things until they were raggedy and holey and simply could no longer be worn in public without being an embarrassment. Once the clothing reached this stage, it was resigned to the rag pile under the sink.

My sense of fashion always revolved around what I could wear based on the physical aspects of my body. No more and no less. The idea of changing my body shape either meant eating less and exercising more, or with the high metabolism I had, just eating more to gain weight to my skinny self.

Our generation had moved from the time of using clothes to try to change the shape of our bodies. Girdles? I thought of them as strange contraptions that Victorian people wore to make their guts more shapely. So imagine my surprise when I heard about blow-up bras from a friend's blog.

Really?  An inflatable bra? I realize that society has this vicious idea of needing to have women feel so bad about their physical appearance that they have to enhance it by any means possible, while men can look however they want and should have all their vices accepted. That's the world we unfortunately live in. But how was using an inflatable bra - in the 1950s - to boost the size of a woman's cleavage a good or even safe concept?

I imagine a man getting cozy with his date. While being playful, he decides to do a bit of nibbling in the chest area.

POP!

Yeah, inflatable breasts were bound to be a disappointment to any man who thought that his date was a double-D size and later took her to the bedroom to see she was really an A. The trust factor there was kinda tense.

The shift from enlarging our chests moved to enlarging our backsides. This craze did start during my generation when a fellow named Sir Mix-A-Lot introduced his desire about large butts.





The "Baby Got Back" video celebrated a woman's naturally appearance and that a woman didn't have to be rail-thin to be beautiful. Then, things changed. It was no longer the "IN" thing to have a flat butt. In fact, a butt that sticks out was now fashionable. And it introduced ways for a flat-butt person can be a little rounder.

Booty pops were born. I actually saw this in a store recently. Just like inflatable bras, booty pops allowed a woman to fake something she doesn't have. She could now wear a piece of clothing that gives her more butt.




Girdles. Shoulder pads. Inflatable breasts. Booty pops. We are running through the entire gamut to please the clothes horse. As for me, I'll continue to place clothes rags under the sink