I admit, as a stay-at-home mom (and these days, with a now regularly napping infant on hand, I literally "stay at home" most of the day), my day to day uniform is pretty casual. Okay, it's really casual. If I change out of a spit-up-stained shirt before I leave the house, and remember to wipe the crumbs from breakfast (which I ate standing up) off my face, it's a good day. A few weeks ago, though, I started to really notice something. We, as a society, really need to pull it together. Especially the women.
I was stopped at a red light in an adjacent suburb when I spotted a 55+ woman waiting for the bus. Now, I know, I know, she's riding the bus. I'm not expecting her to be in a dress and heels if she's not on her way to work. A glance in the mirror before she let the house in her outfit might have been a good idea, however. She was a bit of an apple shape, with thin legs but a round middle. Not obese, but maybe a little overweight. She was wearing dark purple leggings, some type of orthopedic sandal if memory serves, and a t-shirt that hit her just above the hip. It barely met the leggings at the spot where I imagine her waist was supposed to be. Did I mention she wore leggings? To her credit, she had a long-ish button down shirt on, but it was unbuttoned and waving in the breeze, giving all who drove past on that five-lane street a pretty good idea of what she looks like undressed. The shirt was tight, and I'm pretty sure there were no underpinnings pinning her under. Rolls were exposed. Three of them. One. Two. Three. I counted. Again, she wasn't terribly overweight. Just wearing the wrong shirt.
I saw this woman in the middle of the latest season of my favorite show (despite it not being that great this time around), "Mad Men," which is celebrated for its meticulous costumes from the early and mid-1960s. I believe that era marked the beginning of the end for true foundation garments, come to think of it. Seeing this woman made me imagine a person like the character Joan Harris, played by the lovely Christina Hendricks, who could fairly be called full figured but whose dresses are perfectly tailored and whose perfect posture is credited to all the crap she has on underneath the perfectly tailored dress. I imagined Joan Harris being transported to this day and age, in which people wait for the bus in what can best be described as a cotton-poly-blend sausage casing. What would someone from her era think of our society? That woman at the bus stop is not alone. Her peers dress that way. Most adults do these days. Worse yet are the teenage girls in my suburb who wear shorts so short you can see cheek, and their hair is always piled on top of their head in a mess of elastic. Do their moms mind that they look like this? What are their moms wearing? They are probably dressed like me - in stained shirts and yesterday's mascara on because they were too tired to wash their face before going to bed.
Did women have more time for hairstyling, ironing, getting dressed and checking themselves in the mirror back then? People didn't watch as much TV. They didn't have smartphones and tablets to distract them. Is that the problem? Are we too busy texting and looking at Facebook to realize what we look like?
I'm not saying I'm going to start a one-woman campaign to bring back the girdle. I'm just thinking maybe we can pull it together a little bit. I mean, literally, that woman at the bus stop could at least button her shirt.
