Some of the women who come to see me don’t own a full-length mirror. I noticed it a while back and I haven’t stopped thinking about it since. And when I think about why clothes don’t fit women the way they should, why so many women have quietly given up on looking in the mirror at all, I keep coming back to the same answer. It is not their bodies. It never was.
I understand that. When you’ve spent years pulling things off racks that were never made for your body, when nothing fits the way it should, when you leave store after store feeling worse than when you walked in, at some point you stop wanting to see yourself. You start dressing to disappear. You choose clothes that let you blend into the background, that don’t draw attention, that ask nothing of the world and get nothing back.
What I want you to know is that the clothes are the problem. Not you.
Why Clothes Don’t Fit Women – Even When the Size Is Right
Ready-to-wear clothing is built on a fiction, that women’s bodies follow a predictable pattern, that a size 12 looks the same on every woman who wears it. It doesn’t. Two women with identical measurements can put on the same dress and it will hang completely differently on each of them. The darts belong in different places. The tucks need to fall somewhere else. The garment that looks effortless on one looks off on the other, and the woman it doesn’t fit walks away believing something is wrong with her body. This is the real reason why clothes don’t fit women the way they’re supposed to.
Nothing is wrong with your body. Your body is fine. The clothes just weren’t made for it.
I had a bride in my studio recently. She’s in her early twenties, athletic build, beautiful woman. She came in the way so many women come in, already apologizing, already listing the things she didn’t like about herself. I made one dart. One carefully placed tuck. That was it. She turned toward the mirror and went quiet for a moment. Then she told me it was the first time in her life she had looked at herself and felt feminine.
One dart. One tuck. And years of believing the problem was her.
I hear versions of this constantly. Women come in and the first thing they do is tell me everything they hate about their bodies. Their arms. Their waist. The way things sit on their hips. When a woman tells me she hates her arms, I tell her that if her arms looked any different, she would look out of proportion. The body is a whole. You can’t pull it apart into pieces and decide this part is acceptable and that part needs to go. It doesn’t work that way, and more importantly, it isn’t true.
What I do isn’t camouflage. I’m not hiding anything. I’m making the clothes work with the body that’s actually there, so the woman wearing them can stop managing her appearance and start inhabiting it.
Building this business is not easy. I’m 61. I do the sewing, I handle every client personally, and some days I wonder if I should just slow down and breathe. Then a young woman in her twenties looks in the mirror for the first time and really sees herself, and she calls me her fairy godmother. And I remember exactly why I do this. Not to make beautiful clothes, though I do love that. But to help women see themselves as powerful and worthy and worth being seen.
What I see when yu walk in.
If you were standing in my fitting room right now, here is what I would do. I would ask you to look at yourself. And then I would tell you what I see, because I promise you I would see something beautiful. I always do. It is different for every woman, because every woman is different, but it is always there.
What I want for you is to start seeing it too. And I don’t mean the way the world tells you to see yourself, measured against some standard that was never real to begin with. I mean really seeing yourself. The woman you actually are.
It took me a long time to be able to say out loud that I am an expert at anything. It took me a long time to accept a compliment without immediately making it smaller. It took me until my late fifties to see myself as someone who matters, to the world and to the people around me. I don’t want that for you. I don’t want you to wait that long.
The clothes are a good place to start. I know that might sound small, but it isn’t. When you can look in the mirror and smile at yourself, when a few nips and tucks in a blouse or a dress shift something in the way you stand, that is not a small thing. That is the beginning of something. Opportunities find women who walk into rooms like they belong there. They do not find women who are trying to disappear.
You don’t have to disappear. You never did.
If your closet is full of clothes that almost fit, almost work, almost feel right, I’d love to talk with you about what’s possible. A fit consultation is a good place to start. You can find the details at bethsmithcouture.com.