  any run in nina's nylons made my day. nina was a classmate in high school. she had a spanish mother and hence been blessed with good genes making her almost 6ft tall, slender, giving her a perfect olive toned complexion and stunningly shiny dark hair. she was one of them. a member of the "always perfect looking women" club. you know the kind. runs in nina's stockings, which were a rare occurence (she was obviously not like me who just needs to look at nylons and make them get runs), gave me the illusion that she was somehow like the "rest of us" , too.
you could put nina into torn up jeans and an old jumper, put her hair up with a pencil and throw paint all over here (she was good at arts, you know), or in a short skirt and tight shirt and no matter what, she always looked terribly terribly beautiful. perfect. immaculate. everything was always right about her. her skirts were never too short. her shirts never too tight, she never looked sloppy or slutty (whatever that means in high school slang) or over the top. she was just always right, and had a highly developed sense of what suited her and what didn't. she looked effortless. simple. easy. i envied her terribly. to some extend i still do. - not just nina, all women of that "club" .
i have trouble dealing with beautiful, tall women with an easy sense of style. - they are all something that i am not. take a look at me. thick mousy hair (when not highlighted and thinned for an insane amount of ), strange skintone. not tall at all. big hips and legs (must have been good when my ancestors still worked on the fields, bad now when trying to shop for pants).
big breasts. i always look wrong, out of shape, mix-matched. i never look casual, never easy, always made up. let me illustrate: if i do the casual thing, slacks, a plain t-shirt, a sweater round my shoulders, i look sloppy or plain. if i do the more formal route, a shirt, nice pants, i always end up looking too formal or like i never belonged in these clothes in the first place. if i try doing something "hip" (the word alone makes me shudder) i look like i forgot to change out of my mardi gras costume.
i look okay in underwear, naked, or wrapped in a blanket. - but put me in pants or anything else and - woop! - ugly. the harder i try to look good when dressed, the worse the result. no wonder, really. i think the real reason behind this i that i am just not sure what i want to look like, what looks good on me, what i should look like, however you want to put it.
for years (for all my life, probably), i tried to look "like them" and use clothing as an entry ticket into acceptance. most of the time, highly unsuccesfully. had my first little flirt with style terrorism right when changed to high school (which happens over here at the ripe age of 10): benetton, esprit and chevignon were the tommy hilfingers of the day, and big names a must on sweat shirts. i was lonely, didn't know anyone at the new school and harrassed my parents into buying me too expensive sweat shirts, honestly believing that that would help in finding friends. when i had my goth-rasta-punk-hippie-modette phase, clothing was a way to stand out and say "i am different" and it was important to have real authentic 70's clothes, the right shoes, whatnot.
style terrorism wise, the "alternative" scene was as bad as any scene i'd come across beofre or would come across later. in high school, my second hand suede jackets (then supposedly "hip") made me look like i had rummaged through my grandfathers closet (which i had), and not hip at all. someone else must have liked the jacket and deemed it (not me) hip enough though: it was stolen one day in school.
the highlight in style terrorism were my first two years at uni, though, when i tried to convince myself that i, too, enjoyed wearing blue blouses and little hankies round my neck each and every day and deemed burberry check the best fabric for a little skirt suit. it was all terribly shallow. terribly terribly shallow. it made me feel terrible because i never felt at home in my skin.
nor in my second skin, my clothes. when i gave up on shallowness 2 years ago (you know, the thing that sparked me to fall into the throes of clinical depression) and rid my life of a good amount of superficiality, mainly in the form of people who were overly interested in what label your jacket had, i also lost direction somehow. i removed lots of badness from my life but didn't add new goodness. or at least something to wear. i failed to re-invent myself on many levels. and really, it's about time i get that done. at the moment, i need a whole bunch of new clothes (mainly because what i own is mostly too big for me these days), yet i stand in the shops clueless as to what i want and am looking for. i try things on and most of the time feel misplaced and wrong. it's just no fun. even when i don't try on real clothes, looking at myself in clothes is a great way to ruin my mood. friday night, urlLink kitto and i wasted some time using urlLink "virtual models" of ourselved to try on a certain kind of dress at a urlLink website i should be smacked for visiting in the first place. it was horrific. there's been quite a bit of talk about "my virtual model" at plenty of diaries in the past, and i don't quite feel like saying it all again, but let me just add that this thing helped put a nice new twist on my already warped body view. no fumbling with sizing helped make that "model" look like me: the "big breasts, big thighs" thing simply wasn't an option. any weight you added to the "model" was added on the waist, which simply isn't the way that i am built.
in addition, the gowns you could put on your sick looking models sucked, too. as a result, my virtual model looked like a ton. fat and sad and just not right. but then, as i never look "right" , never have and (unless someone sends me to a make-over) probably never will, i guess my virtual model was quite accurate and well done after all. i try to remind myself that it's just clothes, that they don't really matter in the grande scheme of things and that people like me no matter what.
i wish i could not care, feel undisturbed by what i am wearing, not think about make up and just be me, whoever that is. but it's not working. i want clothes that make me feel at home and let me put my energy on worrying about important things. but it ain't working, and i still feel inferior to women who are members of the club. which is a terribly sexist (or whatever -ism) thing, i reckon, and such a sign of my bad self-esteem. all just such a waste of time. wish i could walk around in chantelle bras and thongs all day. that would make life more comfortable. at least for me. 
