A Stroke of Jean-ius

New jeans, new size, new friend. It's a big day in this Fat Lady's world.

I weighed in on Sunday morning at 169.50 pounds, down 81.50 pounds or 32.5% off my original weight. I am now two-thirds of who I used to be. My body is reshaping all over the place, and it’s awesome. My dress pants are hanging off my hips, and my size Medium sweaters are starting to sag at the shoulder. Success in the jeans area, however, continues to elude me. My size 10 no-stretch are too large now, and after all these washings, they are starting to creep up in the hemline. No matter how careful I am with ‘no shrink’ denim, the bottoms inevitably contract and I am left with floods.

I hate floods. I spent the whole of my childhood in “high water” pants. They didn’t make tall sizes back then, or if they did, we couldn’t afford them. As a result, I got so many comments about the water level rising that even now, 32 years removed from the last comment, I don’t wear crop pants, Capris, or anything that is not so long that you can’t even tell whether I’m wearing socks, much less guess the color. I’m even wary of super-long shorts, just on the chance that someone will mislabel me as wearing pants that are length-retarded.

So when the black size 10s started riding up my ankles, I started looking. On the advice of friends, I set my sites on the Gap, LL Bean and Eddie Bauer.

All my cool friends shop at LL Bean, but somehow, I have never been able to bring myself to buy from the Great Preppie Maine-land. There’s something about the LL Bean catalog that confuses and disturbs me. First, I am not a visual person. My brother can look at two threads of a swatch and know how it will look in any room, including one he’s never occupied. I know this, because the only set of usable curtains I ever owned was a set he sent me. “Put them in the family room, on the windows facing the deck,” he’d told me. They fit perfectly and set off the whole room. When I asked him how he’d managed to find the right curtains based only on my complaints and failed attempts, he’d offered merely, “It was obvious.”

Okay, then.

The longest year of my life was 1979 when I had a full year of Plane & Solid Geometry. No matter how many dashed lines I drew, I just couldn’t ‘see’ the figures as three-dimensional. So, seeing pants that are just ‘standing’ there on display means nothing to me. I understand the cache of Bean’s idea about using ‘model-free’ displays, but since there are no people in the clothes, I can’t extrapolate to figure out which will work for me. As LL Bean has no retail locations in Illinois, I had to scratch them off the list.

My referring friend and my fiancé are both Bean fans, so I hold out hope that some day my Wardrobe Mentors will come to my aid and help me with this feat. But for this weekend, jonesing for jeans, I had to move on. I went to the Premium Outlet Mall.

The outlet mall in Aurora boasts a Who’s Who in Upscale Suburban fashion, including all the men (Ralf, Giorgio, and of course, Eddie), many of the women (Victoria, Ann, Lane), and of course, the famed Brooks Brothers. I’ve been out there a few times with Howard, usually when we’re either gunning for something higher end that doesn’t break our wallets, or we just can’t breathe any more mall gas, and so must do our consuming outdoors.

Well, Sunday was about the worst choice for outdoor mall activities. It was about 6 degrees here with a gusty wind that topped out around 25 mph. We layered up and wore our heaviest coats, but still, any time we were outside longer than the few seconds it took to sprint from one store to another was sheer, frozen hell.

I had no luck at the Gap. Nice place and all, but their version of ‘boot cut’ appears to mean, ‘some guy with boots is gonna cut the hem of your jeans and then set up camp in there’. The flare was too dramatic for me. Despite discovering I can wear boots, I have been unable to find a pair that I like, and so when I wear boot cut, I’m reminded of the 1970s when I wore all my bell-bottom jeans with a set of red faux leather platform shoes that looked alarming like sneakers on stilts. So no, I don’t do flare.

I bellied-up on the ‘skinny’ jean section too. I think that Gap ‘skinny’ would be more accurately described as Gap “mermaid”, or really, Gap “hobble” since the legs were so narrow and the crotch so small that I couldn’t get anything up over the Octopus. When I did manage to stuff some of the invertebrate’s head down below the zipper, I couldn’t stand up for fear I’d ‘distress’ an already goodwill-looking pair of stovepipes. So off came the GapPants and on I went in search of fancy panties to take my mind off the fact that I was going to have to wear khakis for the rest of my life.

After the 36DD bra score, I headed off to Eddie Bauer. Hesitant, but still buoyed by the lingerie purchase, I stepped inside and looked around for blue things on hangers.

Eddie Bauer is another one of those places I’d seen and heard about, but never really tried for myself. I’m outdoorsy, in that I don’t like to spend all my life cooped up, but I’m not exactly a camp-and-go gal. I did my tour of duty in the Girl Scouts and I even took a 2-week vacation down the east coast in a tent—once. But as my 30s set in, I decided that I liked hotels. Then later, as my 40s appeared and DS was born, traveling became a true and rare treat. I decided then that I liked expensive hotels that specialized in fawning over their guests. To me, ‘roughing it’ now means no Jacuzzi in my 2-room suite.

Anyway, even though I know that Eddie Bauer isn’t a true Outdoor store, it does have that ‘I like it crisp and chilled’ look, and that’s not me, either. Their clothes-simple, smart, and a wee little bit androgynous, remind me of the Peri-Lesbian era, and that’s something I prefer to stuff down into my memory, rather than share space in my current Girly-Girl Gone Corporate closet. But I was out of choices, and anyway, a new friend had recommended Bauer, and so I went in.

A clerk greeted me at once, and in a true, ‘may I help you?’ way, rather than the Accost You At The Door method that the retail outlets seem to prefer these days. It’s as if everyone took the Old Lady Greeter thing from Wal-Mart and turned it into a Pummel the Customer Upon Entry method. I dislike sales people, and I dislike pestering salespeople more (see post immediately below). This woman, though, simply nodded and smiled as we went in, commented, almost to herself, that jeans were buy one/get one at half off, and then went back to folding Henley’s into perfects sixths. Wow. Good sign.

Howard and I found a few in size 10, and, daring fate, a few more in size 8, including a fancy slit-up-the-side variety called “Novelty”. They had everything in Long sizes, and so I snatched it all and plopped myself into a fitting room. I tried the 8s first, and discovered to my surprise that the Novelty was too long. We couldn’t find a Novelty 8 in average length, and since I was now OFFICIALLY a size 8, I refused to try the 10s. Alas I had to abandon the Novelty and go for something regular.

One thing I noted was that most everything was a stretch of some sort, with 1% spandex mixed in with the denim. I wanted 100% denim. But the Bauer jeans fit nicely-curvy and really long. Could I make an exception this once? I decided to make the compromise. After all, it was more important to me that my socks vanished than it was to prove that I was a True 8, no stretch, no lie.

I found a pair of size 8s (1% lycra) that fit nicely and would clearly be comfy once I gave them the One-Hour Test. This test, which Howard loathes but now practices, basically says that you should buy jeans that you can barely fit into in the dressing room. That’s because denim relaxes, and so an hour after they’re on you for the first time, they’ll stretch and fit you regularly. Of course ‘fit’ is a relative term. I wear my jeans tight: always have. I like them that way. Denim should not sag, so says me. My dress pants can hang off my hips and dangle on my legs, not touching them. But I want my jeans to follow my figure. I couldn’t find anything in an 8 that I liked, and suddenly, all the size 8 longs vanished. Certain of a conspiracy, I asked Howard to find me anything in a long.

And then the most amazing thing happened.

I snuck a pair of 6 longs (1% lycra) into the dressing room. I had to barter hard with the octopus, but I got them up and I got them on. Size 6! That means that somewhere out there is a pair of size 8 no-stretch that will fit me when I’m standing up. Those Tall Girl jeans are size 8. It might be time to pick a weekend and bring them out for public display.

So I have made my peace with stretch jeans. I don’t need the stretch to pretend I’m a size smaller. I know what size I am; this is just for length and for comfort. I can find a 100% denim size 8 if I look hard enough, and probably I will. But for now, I have an 8 in my closet that I can wear anytime, and a 6 that is just a week or so away from Casual Friday.

And to my new friend “Jeanius” who recommended Bauer, thank you. Thank you for writing me, thank you for suggesting Mr. Ed’s, and thank you for ‘seeing’ what I could not.

A the S(ix Long)