If Levi’s Ever Stops Making 501s, I’ll Have to Take My Own Life

Yesterday was the first official day of fall. I think. I’m not sure. But fall means fall clothing! New sweaters and coats and tweedy skirts and knee boots and rain boots and Oxfords and woolen scarves and leather gloves! In anticipation of the new season, I went clothes shopping last Saturday. After trying on approximately 9,476 articles of clothing, I arrived home with the following:

• one cotton tank top, for layering. Color: black.
• one hip-length cotton twill jacket. Color: black.

I don’t think it’s going to be enough to see me through the winter.

My god, how I hate to shop for clothes. In the first place, I live in a desperately unstylish city. People here cling to the completely pointless and false notion that we are “outdoorsy” and “active” and enjoy “hiking” and “rock-climbing” and eating “gorp” and cooking over “campfires” and … oh, sorry, for a minute there I thought I was Chris Farley. That’s what happens when you’re in a fitting room and see your ass in the three-way mirror. A person was not meant to look at her own ass. That’s why it’s in the back. In any case, most people here walk around in Rockport hiking shoes and those stupid hats with the the long yarn tie and tassel hanging from the moronic ear flaps and North Face jackets with ski lift tickets attached to the zipper pull, and they do this even if the only form of exercise they get is lifting the giant tub of mayonnaise off the shelf at Costco. As a result, the clothing stores are overburdened with items made of fleece or, dear lord, Gore-Tex.

Moreover, we have no decent department stores. We used to have a Frederick & Nelson and an I. Magnin, but since neither of those stores sold clothing that could double as a rain shelter, the lack of business caused them to close down. Now we are left with Macy’s and Nordstrom. Macy’s sometimes has nice things, but you can’t find them because they’re sandwiched in between scores of ugly things. If you do happen to stumble upon a nice thing, it will either not be in your size because they never stock more than one of anything or it will have foundation and lipstick smears all over the neckline from various big-headed people just yanking the thing over their faces in the fitting room. And then there is Nordstrom, which is more hygienic and theoretically more service-oriented, but at Nordstrom, you only have two choices: dress like a 16-year-old or dress like a 65-year-old. The other problem with Nordstrom is that they never get anything new. They stock the same shoes, coats, dresses, and sweaters year after year. I got into a snippy little argument with a salesperson there because she tried to show me a bunch of coats they had just received for fall and since I had already purchased one of them, in 2002, I wasn’t all that polite about their selection. I think I might have asked her if she was joking. She then rather sniffily assessed me as someone with no appreciation for the classics. Even though I already knew the answer was going to be, “no, we do not,” I tried to ask her if they had any rain coats that weren’t made out of shiny beige nylon and that didn’t make that annoying swishing sound when you move, but she had already moved on to another customer who was dubiously examining the same toggle-button coat that my sister owned in 1970.

The smaller chain stores, like The Gap or J. Crew, have cute clothes, but they seem to be made for women who are 6′4″ and 107 pounds. Seriously, what is it this year with the pullover sweaters and t-shirts that come down to your knees but are only 12 inches across? I tried on about a hundred of those and, for the most part, they made me look like one of those giant sand worms from Dune. There were a couple that bumped me up to looking as good as a dachshund out for a brisk autumn walk, but even that seemed like less than I was hoping for. A lot of these sweaters have bell-shaped sleeves, which are excellent for inadvertently dragging through guacamole or catching yourself on fire, although I suppose they are slightly preferable to the big bulky cable knit sweaters that have half- or three-quarter-length sleeves, primarily because my arms are of standard length and go all the way down to my hands and everything.

Nor do I have any idea what size I am. Sizing in women’s clothes has always been wildly inconsistent from manufacturer to manufacturer, but since they introduced sizes 0 and 00 a few years ago, it’s skewed everything downward at a time when, in general, people are getting fatter, and when, in particular, I have been getting fatter. Size Medium used to be an 8-10; now it’s a 6-8, but depending on how much the item costs, it could also be either a size 4 or a size 10. High-end clothes have vanity sizing and have to be purchased in a smaller size, while low-end clothes must be purchased in a larger size because the materials aren’t pre-shrunk. On the other hand, sometimes low-end manufacturers adjust for not pre-shrinking, so you have to get your regular size, assuming you know what that is, and disregard the fact that it seems bigger than it should. If you guess wrong and buy a shirt that seems to fit, you may find that after washing it, it is really only suitable for wear by an average-sized 10-year-old. Then there are the stores that think they’re being cute by using European sizing, where a size 36 is equivalent to an American size 4, unless you are shopping on the third Tuesday of the month, in which case it is the same as a size 12.

After hitting all the major points in the mall, and seeing as how I was already feeling disgruntled, I decided to swing by the discount stores and entered a Kohl’s for the first and last time and also the new Nordstrom Rack just south of town. The only notable thing about Kohl’s was that it had the kind of parking lot that looked like one out of which you would be kidnapped in broad daylight. They also had a sweater that looked semi normal until I removed it from the rack and discovered that it was only a sweater in the front. In the back it was a cape, except longer in the middle that at the sides, and I think it might also have had a tail, but I admit to being very confused by that time. Then I went to Nordstrom Rack, which evidently is what we have now instead of leper colonies. A very odd woman followed me for a while and told me all about her broad shoulders and the consequent difficulty in finding a jacket that fits, and when I escaped to the shoe section, I saw a woman with flaking purple polish on her hammertoes trying on all the size 8 shoes while barefooted. The time to flee had arrived.

So, that was my Saturday. I hope to stop intermittently bursting into tears by Thursday, but I can’t promise anything.