As a Rectangular Bride, Dress Shopping Feels Political
The axes of body capital create a web of traps for us all, no matter what our measurements.
I’m in the midst of trying a lot of wedding dresses for an article I pitched as a fun way to capture the (hopefully) last time I pin on a veil and stand on one of those funny podiums in front of wall-to-wall mirrors. The caper seemed simple enough – try on 100 wedding dresses to find my ultimate fit. But after a couple of appointments, I’m finding that there have been some unforeseen, not quite so fun consequences.
Before I go further, I want to add a massive disclaimer. I am fully aware of my body privilege as a white, very slim woman. There are few clothing shops on this planet that wouldn’t have something to fit me, the fashion world (outside of the prohibitive cost of course) is my oyster and what’s more, I have what would generally be seen as a ‘good body’. This opens doors; at least it certainly doesn’t close any.
I also understand that some of what I’m going to say, because of the above, might feel eye rolly. That’s ok and in other shoes perhaps my pupils would point to the sky too. All I can do is write what I know and feel and how I have experienced the world. It might be grating, but that doesn’t mean its inauthentic or untrue.
I ghosted a book last year which changed a lot of my philosophy and made me come to believe that if you have a body, you cannot escape its politics. If we see the delineation between big as equal to bad and small as equal to good as the only axis of body capital, it’s a little like using a blunt tool to fix a pocket watch. When it comes to our bodies – and that is both male and female, both cis and trans—there are so many axes and spectrums along which we either fall in the good or bad camps that instead of a regular graph, we are trying to plot our relative position of power on a constantly shifting constellation of variables.
Physical perfection is such an ephemeral and of course, subjective concept that it is totally possible to feel you are living in a body which is at once both bad and good. Lots of days I have full body confidence, believing my body to be basically irrelevant to my overall worth. I do the work, I counter the negative self-talk with mantras of neutrality and I ease the hate speech directed at one. Then there are the other days.
Being hoicked into a bridal corset while you physically manhandle your own underarm flesh is probably not the one for keeping your inner monologue on the body neutrality train. I have looked at my figure more over the past couple of weeks than I’ve probably looked at it in the past couple of years. And it’s made me remember the areas where I have been subliminally educated to believe I come up short (at 5’3’’, quite literally).
I have a very straight figure. Boyish, athletic, banana, rectangle, column-like. Call it the anti-Jessica Rabbit. When I was in university, one of my boyfriends genuinely broke up with me because he ‘was attracted to a more feminine body type.’ So I guess we can determine it’s not that. The messages we carry about our bodies go sinew deep—even though I’ve put so much body stuff to bed, I’ve never shaken some of these narratives, even after all these years.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Every Shade of Grey to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.