I wore this Beth Ditto for Evans dress to Barcade with my fella and his coworkers. I wondered if wearing a domino dress to a games-themed bar was a little bit too “wearing the band t-shirt to the concert”, but dominoes is not a video game. If I wore a Tetris dress, well, I’d be ashamed of myself. Just kidding! We all know I don’t experience shame.

 

 

The dress is a size UK 14, which accounts for why it’s so small on me as I’m properly a UK 18/20. It’s from the first Beth Ditto for Evans collection, bought on Ebay 3 years after it was released in 2009. It is a bodycon dress and very SNUG. It has the fit issue I have the most consistent encounters with, which is that the arms are too tight and it causes trickle-down fit issues in the bust. Sometimes fat people have fat arms! Imagine that. It might not be the case if the dress were actually my size, of course. If anyone has this dress in an 18 or a 20 they’re looking to trade or sell, let me know! I was nervous wearing this out because it hugs my belly very tightly and I am pretty much always expecting people to be mean to me because of how many times I’ve been harassed, but I got a couple of compliments on the dress, and one girl asking me where I was going because she wanted to hang out. I should have invited her to come with me.

I tried to do cool dark ombre lips like I’ve seen on Tumblr but makeup is difficult when you have no manual dexterity and your vision is poor and all your makeup is cheap. I also have ridiculously nebulous lip outlines so even when I am actually following the line of my lip I look like I’m overdrawing. If I ever tell you that you have a beautifully defined philtrum you can take that compliment from the bottom of my heart because I have real envy going on about that.

I love this dress because it’s bold and it’s designed by someone with a similar shape to mine, still with the intention of clinging to the body and not fooling people into thinking I have an hourglass shape. Beth Ditto’s collection is the last time a celebrity fashion line came out that was daring, reasonably priced, and unique. There isn’t a single item in Rebel Wilson’s Torrid line that I would spend a dime on even if it was on deep discount. I was disappointed to read in an interview with her that initially she wanted to include pieces that were inspired by her school uniform and Torrid’s design team told her “no one is buying preppy”.

I know that Torrid and Lane Bryant’s marketing team actually have an excellent handle on what people are willing to buy. I think sometimes plus size bloggers forget that when we call for more unique, more on-trend, less “flattering pieces”, our opinions are probably not representative of the larger market at all. We’re the ones who are opening ourselves up to visibility and criticism by having online presences, so of course we’re going to be more inclined to ask for the more colorful, the more form-fitting, the less traditional plus size clothing.

The problem is, of course, that plus size is not a demographic. It’s not even a body type. It’s a category of clothing that describes anyone over a size 12 or 14, generally. Personally I dream of a plus size equivalent of Free People and Anthropologie (minus garbage Republican owners) with maybe a (Fat and) Nasty Gal plus size brand for going out. I want Fat Betsey Johnson and Fat Marc Jacobs. But I have to acknowledge that the market research probably does support that maybe fat dollars (our dollars are even fatter, yes) are really consistently going to polyblend work slacks and those horrible t-shirts with the print tie-dye effect. You know the ones I am talking about. They usually have glitter text on them and always make me want to die. But some people like that! Some people like when I want to die.

But a track suit that says Rebel on it? People “aren’t buying preppy” but we’re doing celebrity sweatsuits for fat girls now? Why don’t we get the getup she used to pretend to be a Victoria’s Secret Angel? Why didn’t we get the mermaid outfit she did? Why don’t we get the little police uniform that she wore to trivialize police brutality against Black people at the VMAs? Wait, why were we pretending Rebel Wilson was not going to be terrible to begin with, again?

One of the comments on that Beth Ditto collection from 2009 was from a straight size person who said “it sucks that this isn’t made in smaller sizes”. When was the last time anyone said that about a plus size collection? 2009 was probably the first and last time. I’m anxious for Ashley Nell Tipton to win this season of Project Runway and release her beautiful unicorn clothing again.

In the meantime you can continue to scour eBay for Beth Ditto’s Evans collections as stuff still pops up every so often. I still find the places that I am most at risk for spending all my money at are ASOS, Forever 21+, and ModCloth. I am bummed that a lot of indie designers I liked have gone out of business, like Domino Dollhouse and Candy Strike, but again, blogger favorites don’t seem to be representative of where the money is, especially since bloggers tend to be sent items for free. I haven’t because I am unpopular and often negative, so you know at this point if I say that I like something, I mean it. For what it’s worth. Which is nothing.

Barcade was good, by the way. Martin attempted to BurgerTime but he suspects that drunk people ram the joysticks too hard and now too many of them are unresponsive. Unresponsive joysticks, am I right, ladies?!!

Here are two songs called Domino that I love:

Coltemonikha is produced by Yasutaka Nakata, the man behind Capsule, Kyary Pamyu Pamyu, and Perfume. All his music sort of sounds the same but it’s fine because it’s so good. Those close harmonies in the chorus are so bizarre that they probably had to be computer generated or auto-tuned into existence.

 

Yeah I can get with terrible top-40 sometimes. Being yelled at is not my preferred type of singing but Jessie J is pretty good at yelling. It was that year everyone was putting Dsus4 into their pop tunes like a delicious special sauce.