I hate clothes shopping. Having the sweetest boi ever, I always get sincere offers to go with me and brighten my mood, but this offer is always declined. I know it would end in heartbreak, you see. I know that if I'm looking for anything other than a snarky t-shirt or yet another identical pair of the only jeans that fit me, it will go one of two ways, each well-described as "badly". And I know I am completely insufferable no matter which way it goes.
It goes "Hunting", or "Gathering".
When I already know what I'm looking for, it will not be available in a size that fits me. I will march into the store where I most expect to find it, head directly to where it would be, were it to exist, and throw my hands in the air when I see nothing like it in a reasonable size. I then proceed to the clearance rack and do the same thing. Next, I declare the mission a failure and march my way to the next most promising location, slightly miffed. This repeats, escalating until several of the following are true: my feet hurt; everything is closed; I am out of reasonably promising locations to search and I have marched through too many scary girly teen-centered mall boutiques that occasionally have what I'm looking for hidden in the Seekret Goth Section. If I am lucky, I will have found approximately three items of clothing, one of which is a snarky t-shirt. Note that I have not been looking for a snarky t-shirt. Nearly every scary girly teen-centered mall boutique, by the way, has a Seekret Goth Section. From floor-length black lace skirts to leather bodices with extraneous metal bits to rather plain attire in dark colours, these pits of brightly-lit pink evil hide the niftiest things. All they cost is twice what you want to pay for them and your pride.
When I don't know what I'm looking for, I wander all the same places in a slow daze, occasionally trying on the most absurd and pink things in an attempt to make myself laugh. I will wander aimlessly into departments that have absolutely nothing to do with what I am looking for. Barring a miracle, I will wind up with a snarky t-shirt and a token item of miscellaneous hardware, from camping gear to computer parts to power tools. I will then get home after everything is closed, my feet hurt, I am out of reasonable locations to find just about anything, etc, and I will complain that I (and read this in a very whiny annoying girly voice) still don't have anything to weaaaar. But I will have hardware, so I will feel better.
In either case, I usually find something on my travels that will annoy me beyond the general observation that current clothing trends are hideous and sizes are arbitrary, irregular, and lie to make you feel better or worse about yourself dependent on the price markup at your current shopping location. I will either make annoyed commentary or seethe quietly as it sinks into my head just how offensive I find this occurance when viewed in cultural context. This time it was a tag on some business attire at Express. It told a little story in pink letters. The middle of it read "because I have to look sexy AND professional".
Things like this are probably why I wind up with random hardware. It runs through my head whilst I continue shopping. "Have to", I mutter. "Sexy AND professional." This weekend, I bought a black skirt I couldn't possibly wear to work, a small black mens' tank top, new batteries for my Maglite, and a camping fork. Sexy and professional, eat four D-cells. Corporate America, I stab you with a camping fork. Stabbities. Stabbities, Stabbities, and I still don't have anything to weaaaar.
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The most recent Last Straw for me was going into bebe with Jalen, having the staff coo over her (gorgeous, 5'9"ish, busty and slender-hipped, probably a 6 or an 8) and ask her to model for them, and having them tell me (pretty, 5'8 1/2", athletic and curvy-hipped, a 6/8 in shirts and a 10/12 in pants) that I was fat and if I just dropped 15 pounds maybe I'd be able to fit into more of their stuff. Seethe, seethe, kill. We hates them forever, precious, yessssss.
I particularly enjoy "All they cost is twice what you want to pay for them and your pride." Usually I end up with a snarky t-shirt and a book.
So far I've been lucky on the jeans; the ones that fit are $15 crappy Walmart ones. Go figure.
If the 'children' in that store think you are fat, then maybe someone needs to take them out, sit them down, and tell them that bulemia is not a diet program...then shove a few double cheeseburgers down their throats.
I quite enjoy random browsy shopping, on occasion, but I've been putting off some clothes- and shoe- shopping that I really should get on with for a month or two now - or rather, I've started it, on a couple of occasions, and then stopped half an hour later because I haven't found anything I like yet, and although I wouldn't mind going on, past experience suggests that if I haven't found at least one thing I like in the first half an hour, my judgement about what suits me and what I need will subsequently disintegrate entirely, and I'll either end up with nothing (and then get home later and realise that, tsk, that shirt was nice, fairly cheap, and exactly what I needed), or I'll buy a plain long-sleeved black top (which is just about the only item of clothing that there's no chance whatsoever of my needing more of at any point in the foreseeable future). It's getting to the point where I'm almost willing to take RavenBlack up on his offer to come along, on the grounds that I could then outsource reminders of what I don't need and what doesn't suit me, and finally get it over with, but he would clearly hate it quite a lot, so I continue to resist.
This, on a tangentially related note, is somewhat interesting - a ranty article in Saturday's Guardian that starts off being about the actual (according to the writer, very low) correlation between being overweight (or "overweight") and poor health, and ends up arguing that disgust with the overweight is displaced class hatred and social guilt. I'm not entirely convinced by his conclusions (not unconvinced in particular, just reacting with an "eh, unprovable, surely"), but most of the rest of it lies somewhere between "funny" and "horrifying".
1) Shops for Bitchy Teenagers, where the clothes are often pretty but everything is a size 6.
2) Shops for "women's clothing", where it's all designed for 50 year old starchy conservative businesswomen who like taupe.
3) Plus size shops, where everything is a mumu and it's really hard to find anything at all attractive or flattering. (Note: I think the average American woman is "plus size", which makes this extra annoying. I've shopped in plus size shops and found things that fit me that said they were "large". In some of the places, it's "anorexic" or "plus size", and that's it.)
"Standard" sizes here run from 6 or 8, depending on the shop, to 12/14 in the places where assistants will ask if you need any help and 16/18 everywhere else. I suppose there might be some Bitchy Teenager Shops that don't go over ten, but if there are they're the ones that sell pastel crop-tops and sequined mini-skirts and not much else, so I've never looked. (I've also, to be fair, never looked in the sort of shops that charge $350 for a scarf and that are always unnervingly empty, which for all I know stop at size 4).
Someone suggested that if you've spent all your life desperately trying to weigh as little as possible, the sight of normal-sized people portrayed as attractive (or, for that matter, trying to wear Clothes For Special People Like You, which might also explain the idiot shop assistants) will provoke a sort of furious denial - "I've spent the last six years dieting and it was horrible, so anyone who's not as thin as me CAN'T BE PRETTY, or WHAT WAS THE POINT?" - which seems a vaguely plausible motivation. But still. Agh.
And at least you're female and they do therefore make clothes for you that aren't ugly (and aren't snarky t-shirts), even if they're expensive and it's a huge challenge to find the right ones. :>
"Men's clothing is ugly. Women's clothing is uncomfortable. Nobody wins."
I can find so little that actually fits me that I only go shopping for clothes under duress or at dire, emergency need.
(F'rexample, the last time I bought pants was two summers ago, on the way up to Thresholds, cos I had accidentally left my suitcase at home and hadn't noticed until Virginia and needed something to wear besides the outfit I drove up in.)
I used to do a lot of thrift shopping, cos I knew I wouldn't find things in my size and could just buy what looked fun (I wore a lot of modified men's shirts or vintage brocade sheath dresses for a time. That was fun). I could return to that and/or re-take up sewing. Then I'd only have myself to blame when things were unflattering and ill-fitting. ;>
It's all about the babydoll ones for me. Personally, I think standard t-shirts look unflattering on just about anyone female, and a large portion of the male population as well.
I need a sewing machine that doesn't suck, so I can pretend I'll eventually go through the piles of spare fabric (most of which is scrap-salvageable womens' clothing) and make something of it with my mostly-finished costume-centred theatre degree. Hah.
Also, I share your opinion of T-shirts, both babydoll and otherwise.