Snagged By Rule 34
Today I learned I need to make a slight
alteration to my vocabulary: specifically, quit using a certain phrase
in reference to a recent unpleasant sartorial period in my personal
life, and find a more appropriate alternative.
I'm a clothes horse who's been shopping at thrift stores for pretty much my entire adult life. So, between the facts "I like 'nice' clothes" and "I know where to find nice clothes (pre-pandemic) dirt cheap," for the majority of my adult existence, if you were to ask "How many nice, comfortable, flattering garments does Jennifer have for her local environment, compared to the typical American woman in her socioeconomic bracket," the answer would be "Considerably more than average."
Until recently. Four years ago, at the height of a brutally hot summer, I moved to the Deep South after a lifetime in milder, more northerly climes, and immediately discovered "The summer clothing I have now won't remotely cut it down here." Among other things: in Connecticut I could often get away with wearing a short-sleeved shirt in summer, without even needing sunblock unless I planned to be outdoors a significant amount of time -- but in Georgia, the first time I ever tried exposing my bare skin to the sun (wearing a sleeveless sundress on a 90-degree June day Jeff and I planned to spend looking at various rental-home options), my arm literally stung IMMEDIATELY when the late-morning sunlight hit it. And up north almost all of my summer clothes were made of thin cotton material, but cotton's moisture-hoarding tendencies make it intensify the already virulent humidity down here. I had a few silk summer garments, and silk is much better at repelling humidity, but it is also extremely efficient at heat retention, so all but the thinnest and loosest silk is best avoided in hot weather. Etc.
Through trial and error, I eventually learned how to dress properly down here in summer. Short version: wear lots of rayon and rayon/linen blends. For my own personal clothing/style tastes -- garments I'd choose if climate and temperature conditions were no object, and I only need concern myself with 'style/appearance' plus overall comfort -- there are scads of attractive clothes-I-like available in rayon, and until I had to quit thrift shopping a couple months ago, I was well on my way to re-establishing the status quo "The number of garments I have for local conditions, Georgia summertime version, is higher than average for a typical American woman." (Right now, thanks to rayon, I think I actually have more pairs of nice black summer pants and nice black summer jackets/blazers than I had at the height of my Goth days.)
But when I first started looking for Deep South clothes four years ago, I did not yet know this about rayon. In fact, I erroneously believed rayon was bad for hot and humid conditions, because I thought "Rayon is a manmade fiber. Polyester and nylon are also manmade fibers, and they are hideous for hot or humid conditions. Ergo, rayon probably is too." For a long time -- IIRC close to two years or so, until a friend set me straight about rayon's ideal anti-humidity qualities -- the ONLY "deep summer" clothes I bought were made of linen. And linen is relatively rare by thrift-store standards -- if I had to guesstimate, I'd say a typical thrift-store clothing rack will have 50 to 100 cotton garments for every one made of linen. Plus, linen as a textile doesn't really work well for my preferred style/manner of dress anyway -- it won't hold much of a form, but somehow always manages to look a little baggy and ill-fitting even when a garment is cut perfectly for my size and shape. Especially pants -- I have a couple of actually-attractive linen shirts, but I have YET to find the pair of linen pants that look good on me.
But in my early Atlanta days, when I was genuinely desperate for any clothes I could wear outside without sunburn or overheating, and falsely believed "Linen is the only fabric that will work in such brutal conditions," I bought myself quite a few linen garments I never, ever would've bought otherwise, not even at the < $1-$2 prices most of them cost me: shirts in awful colors and hideous styles [e.g. "ruffled frills"], some so oversized they were even too big for Jeff -- and equally terrible linen pants with ugly earth-tone colors and elastic or drawstring waists, and the first few pairs I bought were so large I had to take in their waistbands with a safety pin or they wouldn't stay up. (I did not, however, buy any pants requiring safety pins to take up the hems.)
I called these my "desperation clothes," because I bought them during that early Georgian period when I was genuinely desperate for anything I could safely wear outside in daylight. Eventually I reached the point where I quit buying desperation clothes, because I had enough that I could at least afford to establish such minimum standards as "I won't buy clothes unless they actually fit me, without safety pins" (though within those parameters, I still couldn't be choosy about color or style--and my definition of "these clothes fit" still allowed for a lot more baggy shapelessness than my usual norm).
And then, finally, I reached the point where I could also afford to say "No more clothes unless they fit AND they are in colors and styles I actually like." This got much easier once I discovered I could (and should) buy rayon for summer wear too.
At long last, I think at some point only in the past six months or so, I had enough deep-Georgia-summer clothing that I could do a culling: namely, I went through my linen desperation clothes and decided which ones I'd keep as pajamas/housework clothes, and which I'd re-donate to the thrift store. Pants requiring safety pins in their waistbands all went back to the thrifts, as did the frilly shirts because the frills made them uncomfortable to sleep in ... but I can't remember how many other shirts and pants I may have got rid of, and why. And of course, when I did that clothes-culling, I assumed I'd still be making regular thrift-store visits and acquiring at LEAST three or four new-to-me garments in a typical month -- I certainly did not foresee or expect anything like covid-19's changes to my normal daily existence.
Now that I'm stuck at home all day, and will not be making any thrift-store visits or new-clothes acquisitions for the foreseeable future, I'm kind of wishing I'd saved some of those desperation clothes -- better to wear out an oversized pair of pants I don't even like and nobody will ever see, than wear out good (or even minimum-tolerable) clothes under such conditions.
I checked the archives at a chat forum I frequent -- I know I'd talked about "desperation clothes" there before, and a couple of clothes-cullings, but don't recall if I mentioned that specific cull a few months back, or whenever the hell it was. So I typed "desperation clothes" into the search engine of the forum.
At least, I intended to. But I'd absent-mindedly typed the phrase into my browser search bar instead, so rather than search for the phrase in the archives of an obscure chat forum, I ended up doing an unfiltered DuckDuckGo search of the entire internet.
(urk)
(you might want to leave rather than read the rest of this)
Apparently -- this information is derived from the approximately 0.83 seconds I spent pondering the search results, before going back to the forum -- there exists a subcategory of porn involving women who piss themselves, presumably because they're denied access to a bathroom and eventually reach the point where they can no longer hold it in. And this particular porn subgenre comes up if you do a regular unfiltered online search for "desperation clothes."
I'm a clothes horse who's been shopping at thrift stores for pretty much my entire adult life. So, between the facts "I like 'nice' clothes" and "I know where to find nice clothes (pre-pandemic) dirt cheap," for the majority of my adult existence, if you were to ask "How many nice, comfortable, flattering garments does Jennifer have for her local environment, compared to the typical American woman in her socioeconomic bracket," the answer would be "Considerably more than average."
Until recently. Four years ago, at the height of a brutally hot summer, I moved to the Deep South after a lifetime in milder, more northerly climes, and immediately discovered "The summer clothing I have now won't remotely cut it down here." Among other things: in Connecticut I could often get away with wearing a short-sleeved shirt in summer, without even needing sunblock unless I planned to be outdoors a significant amount of time -- but in Georgia, the first time I ever tried exposing my bare skin to the sun (wearing a sleeveless sundress on a 90-degree June day Jeff and I planned to spend looking at various rental-home options), my arm literally stung IMMEDIATELY when the late-morning sunlight hit it. And up north almost all of my summer clothes were made of thin cotton material, but cotton's moisture-hoarding tendencies make it intensify the already virulent humidity down here. I had a few silk summer garments, and silk is much better at repelling humidity, but it is also extremely efficient at heat retention, so all but the thinnest and loosest silk is best avoided in hot weather. Etc.
Through trial and error, I eventually learned how to dress properly down here in summer. Short version: wear lots of rayon and rayon/linen blends. For my own personal clothing/style tastes -- garments I'd choose if climate and temperature conditions were no object, and I only need concern myself with 'style/appearance' plus overall comfort -- there are scads of attractive clothes-I-like available in rayon, and until I had to quit thrift shopping a couple months ago, I was well on my way to re-establishing the status quo "The number of garments I have for local conditions, Georgia summertime version, is higher than average for a typical American woman." (Right now, thanks to rayon, I think I actually have more pairs of nice black summer pants and nice black summer jackets/blazers than I had at the height of my Goth days.)
But when I first started looking for Deep South clothes four years ago, I did not yet know this about rayon. In fact, I erroneously believed rayon was bad for hot and humid conditions, because I thought "Rayon is a manmade fiber. Polyester and nylon are also manmade fibers, and they are hideous for hot or humid conditions. Ergo, rayon probably is too." For a long time -- IIRC close to two years or so, until a friend set me straight about rayon's ideal anti-humidity qualities -- the ONLY "deep summer" clothes I bought were made of linen. And linen is relatively rare by thrift-store standards -- if I had to guesstimate, I'd say a typical thrift-store clothing rack will have 50 to 100 cotton garments for every one made of linen. Plus, linen as a textile doesn't really work well for my preferred style/manner of dress anyway -- it won't hold much of a form, but somehow always manages to look a little baggy and ill-fitting even when a garment is cut perfectly for my size and shape. Especially pants -- I have a couple of actually-attractive linen shirts, but I have YET to find the pair of linen pants that look good on me.
But in my early Atlanta days, when I was genuinely desperate for any clothes I could wear outside without sunburn or overheating, and falsely believed "Linen is the only fabric that will work in such brutal conditions," I bought myself quite a few linen garments I never, ever would've bought otherwise, not even at the < $1-$2 prices most of them cost me: shirts in awful colors and hideous styles [e.g. "ruffled frills"], some so oversized they were even too big for Jeff -- and equally terrible linen pants with ugly earth-tone colors and elastic or drawstring waists, and the first few pairs I bought were so large I had to take in their waistbands with a safety pin or they wouldn't stay up. (I did not, however, buy any pants requiring safety pins to take up the hems.)
I called these my "desperation clothes," because I bought them during that early Georgian period when I was genuinely desperate for anything I could safely wear outside in daylight. Eventually I reached the point where I quit buying desperation clothes, because I had enough that I could at least afford to establish such minimum standards as "I won't buy clothes unless they actually fit me, without safety pins" (though within those parameters, I still couldn't be choosy about color or style--and my definition of "these clothes fit" still allowed for a lot more baggy shapelessness than my usual norm).
And then, finally, I reached the point where I could also afford to say "No more clothes unless they fit AND they are in colors and styles I actually like." This got much easier once I discovered I could (and should) buy rayon for summer wear too.
At long last, I think at some point only in the past six months or so, I had enough deep-Georgia-summer clothing that I could do a culling: namely, I went through my linen desperation clothes and decided which ones I'd keep as pajamas/housework clothes, and which I'd re-donate to the thrift store. Pants requiring safety pins in their waistbands all went back to the thrifts, as did the frilly shirts because the frills made them uncomfortable to sleep in ... but I can't remember how many other shirts and pants I may have got rid of, and why. And of course, when I did that clothes-culling, I assumed I'd still be making regular thrift-store visits and acquiring at LEAST three or four new-to-me garments in a typical month -- I certainly did not foresee or expect anything like covid-19's changes to my normal daily existence.
Now that I'm stuck at home all day, and will not be making any thrift-store visits or new-clothes acquisitions for the foreseeable future, I'm kind of wishing I'd saved some of those desperation clothes -- better to wear out an oversized pair of pants I don't even like and nobody will ever see, than wear out good (or even minimum-tolerable) clothes under such conditions.
I checked the archives at a chat forum I frequent -- I know I'd talked about "desperation clothes" there before, and a couple of clothes-cullings, but don't recall if I mentioned that specific cull a few months back, or whenever the hell it was. So I typed "desperation clothes" into the search engine of the forum.
At least, I intended to. But I'd absent-mindedly typed the phrase into my browser search bar instead, so rather than search for the phrase in the archives of an obscure chat forum, I ended up doing an unfiltered DuckDuckGo search of the entire internet.
(urk)
(you might want to leave rather than read the rest of this)
Apparently -- this information is derived from the approximately 0.83 seconds I spent pondering the search results, before going back to the forum -- there exists a subcategory of porn involving women who piss themselves, presumably because they're denied access to a bathroom and eventually reach the point where they can no longer hold it in. And this particular porn subgenre comes up if you do a regular unfiltered online search for "desperation clothes."
posted by Jennifer Abel at 7:43 PM
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