WOMENPLUS+

I hate thinking about fashion, probably because I’m not exactly a fashionista. My style is more about wanting to look nice but also refusing to suffer for the sake of a current trend. Long gone are the days of wearing shoes that hurt or pants that require multiple prayers and various Cirque du Soleil moves to get them over my hips and zipped.

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My real fashion epiphany, the one that irrevocably changed my style, happened during the pandemic. Two years of living almost solely in leggings with a “deluxe comfort” fit, sports bras, T-shirts and tennis shoes seriously altered my fashion DNA.

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I can now barely handle anything with a zipper, and as for shape-wear that suppresses — or to use marketing terms, “fiercely sculpts” — your fat, while also killing your joy for life, ability to breathe or conduct any serious business in the bathroom due to a very real fear that you’ll never be able to pull your “shape-wear” back up, well, all that nonsense is totally dead to me.

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As in, bye-bye nylon and Lycra undergarments manufactured by evil trolls in spandex unitards in a factory on the outskirts of a hell that’s powered by the sadness of women wanting to enjoy the party they’re at yet can’t because they’re being tortured by their shape-wear.

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This swearing off of Satan’s underwear and a pledge to only wear clothes that make me happy both mentally and physically was all well and good until I had to put it into practice. Last week I was forced to venture out into the perilous world of jean shopping.

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Finding a pair of jeans back in the day was not that difficult, primarily because there weren’t that many choices. For me it was always a pair of button fly Levi’s from (I kid you not) the local feed store. If you wanted really good jeans you went with what the farmers were wearing.

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But over the years, jeans have become a fashion statement, and that means we’re at the mercy of the whims of designers who probably did an internship at the aforementioned factory in hell. Because how else can the scourge called low-rise jeans be explained? I don’t think at any point women were clamoring for our hip bones to be freed from the tyranny of being clothed.

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Then in a real “hold my beer” moment, designers unleashed jeggings (jeans + leggings) on us, which was a disgrace to the entire denim industry and I’m sure had Levi Strauss rolling over in his grave.

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Once jeggings happened you couldn’t put that fashion genie back in the bottle and we soon had toothpick jeans, skinny jeans, and, my current personal nemesis, high-waisted jeans, because wearing pants that start at my bra line isn’t a fashion choice — it’s a hate crime.

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Saddled with all this denim baggage I bravely spent almost an entire day searching for jeans that didn’t make me cry. It took hours but I finally found a pair that hearkened back to my farm supply store glory days. For a brief moment in time, all was right with my world.

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But that joy was cut short when I ventured to a rack with shirts and laid my eyes on something I thought had died 20 years ago: the peplum top. As in a blouse with a ruffle at the bottom which adds more heft to your midsection than eating a case of Snickers bars and chasing that with cookies bought in bulk from Costco.

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What are designers doing? Throwing darts at past fashion trends that caused emotional harm and then enthusiastically bringing them back?

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I almost had a breakdown in the store but then I reminded myself I had found jeans that made me happy and I willed myself to be content with that fashion win.

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Reach Sherry Kuehl at snarkyinthesuburbs@gmail.com, on Facebook at Snarky in the Suburbs, on Twitter at @snarkynsuburbs on Instagram @snarky.in.the.suburbs, and snarkyinthesuburbs.com.