At Ease
Clothing and Confidence: Redefining Beauty through Fashion
By Abigail Zajac, Missouri
At six months old I started to pick out my own clothes. My face would light up when my mom opened my closet for me. She would hold me up as I enjoyed feeling each piece of frilly, pink clothing, browsing until I latched on to the right one. Not yet having established an extensive vocabulary, I would point to which items I wanted to wear that day and my mother would dutifully grab the hangers with one hand, while holding me with the other. When I hit kindergarten, I would line up two to three outfit choices the night before and make my decision in the morning. I expanded my palette to different colors, but never pants because I would scream and cry at the feeling of pants on my legs.
Later, I will be diagnosed with autism and will look back at these choices and rituals as a way I regulated my sensory environment. I will find out that my neurodivergence is what gives me this fixation on clothing. This interest will grow with me. I will come to see clothing as a way to connect my mind and body, to express how I feel, what I think and believe. I will come to see power in the way I dress because I will learn that so many people use clothing as a way to hide their body, to forget about insecurities, to push themselves into cultural norms by making themselves seem more feminine or masculine.
I have never seen my body as a gender. Of course, I was raised as a girl, and I feel comfortable in my own skin, but when I look in the mirror, I have never seen a “girl” or a “female” or a “woman.” I just see myself. I see strong thighs and soft hips. I see scars from when I didn’t love myself and my freckles from days spent in the sun. I see thick, wavy hair layered in shades of honey from all the times I dyed it to match my mood. I see a stomach, sometimes full with good food, and sometimes hungry. I see all these things. I see me, and it makes me feel proud. I look in the mirror and smile, knowing my mind rests in a beautiful place that is well taken care of. I see a figure that is as unique and complex as the brain it holds, and nothing less or more, however, this assimilation is only an anomaly, a product of an upbringing of radical self-love, a successful attempt at breaking generational cycles and resisting patriarchal messaging.
My mother was raised within a culture where a person’s weight was directly correlated to their health. She was never particularly overweight, but she has the same build as me: thick thighs, wide hips, and large breasts, “curvy” in a sense. From what I know, this body type wasn’t “in style” when she was growing up and having a body that was out of the cultural norm led her to experience shame and believe she should only wear certain kinds of clothes.
A study from YouGov conducted in 2019 showed that one in five adults felt shame due to their body image in the past year. When focusing this study on women in the United States, that percentage ranges from 37 to 91 percent depending on the study. Because I am a woman, I have seen these statistics firsthand. I know women who cannot look at a scale for fear of spiraling and not being able to eat. I know women who fear eating and have to use various methods to trick themselves into getting nutrients. I know a woman who will not wear shorts, even in the hottest weather because her mother told her she had “ugly knees.” I know a woman who has had gastric bypass surgery due to years of yo-yo dieting. I know so many women who look in the mirror and scrutinize instead of love.
Getting older, I am becoming ever more aware of the dissonance between how I look at my body and how most women I know view themselves. I know how most of them got there: abusive parents and partners, bullying, and media consumption. When these women pour out their hurt for me to bear witness to, they all echo the same three things, which leads me to believe that we are not the problem. No one comes into this world hating the skin they were born in; instead, we are taught that this is the way it should be. We learn to be overly critical of ourselves, so when someone else does it, it doesn’t sting as much. According to the United State’s Office of Women’s Health, “Girls are more likely than boys to have a negative body image… because many women in the United States feel pressured to measure up to strict and unrealistic social and cultural beauty ideals.”
An easy place to find beauty standards is within advertisement. Advertisements are designed to make people want, and in a “modern” world we are pushed to want a lot of things. According to a study from Red Crow Marketing Company, the average person is exposed to anywhere between 1,000 to 4,000 advertisements a day. That is an overwhelming amount of messages to receive. But it’s not always from advertisements. Thanks to the development of social media, there are now many ways to have sponsored content, content that has an agenda to sell something.
Perhaps this concept is best explained by a testimonial in a 2022 New York Times article on student body image:
“I’ve been battling anorexia for almost two years, but I’ve been hateful towards my body since at least 2016. I still have marks from where my 3rd-grade self scratched the measurements of my waist and hips in pencil on my bathroom door. Back then, I was watching the YouTubers of the mid-2010s, who looked effortlessly flawless showing their midriffs in halter tops and mini skirts, when I could never feel confident wearing the same things, despite being slender.”
This student goes on to describe how she became obsessed with “ultrathin supermodels ad heroin chic movie stars” that were idolized through Instagram pages. This glorification led her to cut calories and increase exercise to a degree that she believes made her “potentially infertile.” She correlates her negative body image to her social media use, a phenomenon which has been widely researched with the growing number of female adolescent suicides since its creation.
A study from the American Psychological Association found that reducing social media use can significantly improve body image in teens and young adults, but other studies have found no correlation between screen time and body image. I believe this is because messaging around body image comes from more than one place. It would be a logical fallacy to try to blame the rising number of eating disorders entirely on social media for women have been starving themselves since the dawn of time. Before it was heroin chic, it was the consumptive look, with Victorian women consuming arsenic to look half dead.
Society has consistently sent women subliminal messaging that fitting into the “ideal” body image makes women more desirable, which increases their chances of success in some way. For women, this is almost a cultural survival instinct. The mother in us all wants our daughters to be safe, protected, and with a mate. This instinct might be what draws mothers to portion-control their daughter’s meals or establish a rigorous exercise routine, not health, but natural selection. Yet, we do not need this anymore, right? As a society, haven’t we surpassed starving ourselves to seem desirable? I know I have, but I was raised with love for myself.
Each time I went shopping with my mother. She would inevitably be sitting in the waiting room as I tried on an array of outlandish outfits. I would come out and ask, “How do I look?” Without fail, she would smile and ask “How do you feel?” If I answered with “I don’t know.” She would reply, “Well, are you comfortable? Do you feel confident?” And if the answer was no, the clothing would be put back on the rack because there was no need to spend money on something that would make me feel bad about myself.
At the time, I thought this was normal: it was all I knew. Now, I know it is revolutionary. When I walk into a dressing room, I see something that so many other women do not see. I see jeans are too small and not hips that are too big. I see a body fluctuating in size, not a woman that is fat. I see a woman who looks good because she feels good, not because someone told her she is pretty.
I am left wondering how the world would change if every mother taught her daughter to think like this. Would there even be a fashion industry if we focused on how we feel versus how we look? Can radical self-love really create radical change?
I know I don’t hold the keys to the kingdom of world peace, but I know I am at peace with myself, and I know I create a little change in everyone I meet. I know this because when I walk into a room, without fail, people stare, babies stop crying, parents look up from their phones, old ladies stop gossiping and everyone turns their head to see what it looks like when a woman is at ease in her own body.
Reference List
Ballard, J. (2021, May 26). YouGov Body Image Study 2021: How Americans are feeling about their body image. YouGov. https://today.yougov.com/society/articles/36099-yougov-body-image-study-2021?redirect_from=%2Ftopics%2Fsociety%2Farticles-reports%2F2021%2F05%2F26%2Fyougov-body-image-study-2021
Goldfield, G. (2023, February 23). Reducing social media use significantly improves body image in teens, young adults. American Psychological Association. https://www.apa.org/news/press/releases/2023/02/social-media-body-image
Holtermann, C. (2022, March 21). Does Social Media Affect Your Body Image? The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/21/learning/does-social-media-affect-your-body-image.html
Marshall, R. (2015, September 10). How Many Ads Do You See in One Day? Red Crow Marketing. https://www.redcrowmarketing.com/blog/many-ads-see-one-day/
U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Office on Women’s Health. (2021, February 17). Body image and mental health. OASH Office on Women’s Health. https://www.womenshealth.gov/mental-health/body-image-and-mental-health/body-image
This is a personal narrative detailing my experiences with fashion and its connection to body image. The piece also includes commentary on the challenges that young women encounter in embracing their bodies, along with the external influences that seek to hinder their self-love and acceptance. I choose to share this piece because I believe my experience is non-traditional and can offer a new perspective to the ever-growing literature on these topics.
X: @abigailzajac
