Magazine Knows Best

Miss J opened the TFFF discussion on magazines with her review of Vogue's Shape Issue. Magazines love to dress their "real life readers". Rarely does an issue go by without a feature on dressing to suit your shape, or making the most of your best bits. What's interesting about those features is what those best bits supposedly are.

Often they'll choose a trend, say a colour or a particular silhouette, and do a What to Wear If You're...Tall, Skinny, Petite or Plus. (They rarely accommodate a shape that combines two or more of those things. What if you're tall and plus, or petite and plus, hmmm?)

Some magazines do it brilliantly: Seventeen, for instance. I have an old issue next to me, from August 2004. The cover headline is "Clothes For Your Shape & Budget". At first you're worried it will be another case of dressing the plus girl in jeans and a long-length tunic top to cover her 'faults'. Instead, inside you find lots of cute readers wearing different looks, labelled according to trend, not size. A plus-petite girl next to a tall-curvy, or a skinny-petite next to a plus-tall. Not a shape label in sight.

Teen Vogue from November of that year is great, too: cute outfits, in all sizes, with no lecturing, and fun pull-quotes like "On me, knee-length skirts fall below the knee. So of course I love minis!" Trust me, as a 5'3" munchkin, I know whereof this girl speaks.

I will give the teen mags credit - they might use the same ol', same ol' slim models, but they do feature a wider range of sizes and looks than their adult counterparts. And I love that their What To Wear... pieces rarely show you step by step, size by size - instead they mix it all up and provide plenty of options, for you to make your own mind up.

No, the problem comes when magazines do makeovers or show readers how to adjust looks and trends to their figure 'problems'. I've been searching and searching for pertinent examples, but despite owning a houseful of magazines dating back a decade, I just can't. I tend to throw any issues I'm anti into the recycling, never to darken my doorstep. But y'all know what I'm talking about, right?

They'll show a plus-size reader she too can wear a mini-dress....so long as she covers up her problem legs with jeans! Want to wear the trendy It dress? Well, you CAN'T - unless you wrap those upper arms in a shawl! Steer clear of tight clothes...short clothes...flesh-exposing clothes...

It doesn't just apply to the plus-sizes, either. Skinny, flat-chested lasses are told to make the most of their little waists and arms...but heaven forfend they should rock their non-existent cleavage. Tall girls must wear layers and blocks of different colours to 'break up' their height. Short women shouldn't wear maxi or layers because it will reveal that they are - horrors - short.

The What To Wear... pieces always focus on the negative, indeed they invent negatives. Who says a rounded tummy is a flaw? What's wrong with looking tall if you are in fact tall? Why should thighs that rub together stay under wraps, along with bingo wings? I'm all for accentuating the positive, but that's rarely what magazines do.

The focus on plus-sizes wearing trends is never, hubba hubba come to mamma, did you see those boobies? It is your solemnly sworn duty to wear this scoop-necked dress with this bra and present your breasteses on a platter. Or it's not, good gracious, ass is bodacious! Take these butt-accentuating skinny jeans and corset, and show the world what you're going to do with all that junk inside your trunk. No, it's always, cover that belly! hide yourself! away, away with this flesh!

Do do this. Don't do that. Avoid this is you're this and that if you're that. C'mon. We can dress ourselves, you know. I've been doing it for 25 years! Okay, I've been doing it for 25 years minus the years my parents did it, and minus the years I had to be forced, kicking and screaming, into Clothkits dungarees when I really wanted to run naked like a butterfly (um, a butterfly with legs) through the garden before eating some mud.

But really - I love a bit of style advice, or a friend to tell me what works, or a magazine to offer solutions to certain issues. I wish I'd had a magazine to advise me not to wear my teen favourite outfit of maroon crushed velvet elasticated waist tube skirt + green hand-knitted jumper + unlaced converse + giant sunflower + floppy hat like Six from Blossom, but then I wouldn't have the memories. Ah, sweet memories.

What I do have a problem with is people telling me, and others, that our figures are problems. That your butt is not, as I thought, a wonderful playground wherein Matthew McConaughey may play the cheeks like bongos, but a thing to be hidden; that big juicy thighs or arms or indeed any body part are not wonderful, ripe, rich, firm lovely goodies, but flaws to be disguised.

The only flaws of mine I will ever try and disguise are pimples and my giant ego.

(Ooh, speaking of my ego - let me pimp my latest article for The Independent!)