Attack of the clothes and the killer heels...

This may sound a bit bizarre but I think my clothes have got it in for me. Hmm, on reading that back I may want to think about altering it, given my fragile mental state at the moment. You just know that if I went doolally in a sweet shop and started hurling around Curly Wurlys that my psychiatrist will read this and say ‘aaah, paranoid delusions eh?’ and I’ll have sealed my own fate.

I should really explain, I don’t think it is just my clothes but my footwear as well...that sounds even more bizarre! How can I really elucidate on my material fear? I have never found a comfortable outfit that hasn’t been a pair of pyjamas (and even they seem to ride up in the middle of the night to show my chest!). Don’t get me wrong, I am not suggesting that we should all wander around completely unfettered (Scotland is far too cold for that!), I just think that it would be nice to own an item of clothing that doesn’t feel the need to start a career in comedy or assault.

You see, I don’t think I own a single item of clothing that hasn’t betrayed me in some way – blouses that have burst their buttons disgorging my breasts, skirts that have ripped open at the slightest provocation, cardigans that have entangled me in various inanimate objects, tights that roll down my body so that the gusset ends up at my knees and worst of all the footwear that has torn the skin from my heels, broken in two or simply caused me agonising pain regardless of insoles and other various gel based solutions.

I think that it may have started in my childhood. When I was about 13 or so at school I was running to a class when my knickers’ elastic emitted an enormous twanging sound and they fell down. Now, I don’t think I have to explain the logistical problem in running with an underwear malfunction but I think you get the picture. I was so embarrassed, not only at that but at the fact that I had to corner my P.E. teacher to explain the problem and seek a safety pin. The women could barely contain her amusement as I desperately attempted to pin the now massively oversized under crackers. I still to this day remember the shame that must have radiated all over my face as the teacher said ‘hmm, that is a problem isn’t it?’ smirking and holding out the safety pin.

Apparently, so I am told, when I was a child I used to take my clothes off all the time and run around the garden and house. I sincerely hope that I consigned my nudity to just the house and garden as I am not sure at what age I stopped this odd behaviour as I can remember very little before my eighth birthday but according to my parents I had this sort of obsession with running around nude...oh yeah, I used to wear wellington boots too...along with the nude thing. Like I said, I sincerely hope that my nudity and rubber fetish are far behind me now but I think that this perhaps goes some way to helping me understand my problem with clothes.

I always hated clothes shopping, even now I sort of decide what I want in my head and go searching for that rather than run through the whole selection in each store. If I don’t see what I am looking for I don’t tend to buy anything. I think my hatred of clothes shopping comes from my deep rooted memories of desperately wanting a pair of ‘Clarks Magic Steps’ (I believe that’s what they were called) shoes with a key in the heel but my parents wouldn’t buy me them and I remember being really miserable about that – I was about 5! I also think that clothes shopping with my Dad was always a truly awful experience due to the fact that it generally ended in an argument. I love my Dad to bits but he never quite grasped the fact that I am a girl and should be wearing girls clothing. You see, when my parents divorced when I was fourteen I stayed with my Dad and with him being a man with no real experience of what it is like to be a fourteen year old girl he tended to treat me like a boy as he had experience of being a boy. For example, when I had to go shoe shopping with my Dad he would pick up a pair of shoes and say ‘These are lovely, we could get you these?’ and they would be hideous, male shoes in sizes far greater than my tiny feet. I would say that I didn’t like them and immediately he would break into the ‘you never like anything that I pick out as you’re just trying to be awkward’ argument so generally any pre-school year clothes shopping trip would be sullied with my Dad being confused as to what to buy me and me wanting some sort of totally inappropriate shoes that would hurt my feet and fall to bits as soon as it rained. I developed a sort of pavlovian reaction where if my Dad said ‘Those shoes are falling off your feet, time to get some new ones’ or ‘Your jumper has a hole in it, we’d better get you some new clothes’ I instantly felt stressed and anticipated a row so the shopping experience was forever ruined.

I envy men on the clothes front; no matter what men wear they always look ok. You never see a man having to hoist up a boob tube every five minutes (mind you, in Edinburgh anything is possible), I have never seen a man have to take his shoes off because although they looked great in the shop they are agony to wear, if a man has his flies down he isn’t so mortified that he has to hide in the toilets for the rest of the evening. For example, a friend of mine wandered outside a pub for a cigarette and I happened to notice his flies were down and I asked him if he had been to the loo and he said ‘Aye, why?’. When I tried to discreetly indicated that he was showing his bits to an Edinburgh street he smiled cheekily and said ‘Och well, you know what they say – it pays to advertise’ and with that he deftly drew up his fly and continued to smoke happily! He wasn’t even drunk! I once fell out of a dress I was wearing and I cried for about an hour!

A dear friend of mine once told me that most mornings he gets out of bed, runs his fingers through his hair, gets dressed and sets off to work without even having to look in the mirror. He also said that even if he does look in the mirror he generally thinks ‘yeah, I look ok’ and it’s true, he’s a handsome chap. I did a quick poll of a few of my male friends and they said pretty much the same. They also said that they didn’t have any sort of problem with any of their clothes, except for bowties – bowties are of course evil, for anyone who has ever attempted to tie one if you have managed it then well done as they are a complete pain.

Anyway, if I run through a few examples of my wardrobe malfunctions it should give you a better picture as to why I generally think that my clothes are plotting to injure or embarrass me...

Several years ago, I battled anorexia and became very thin, too thin, and once I had gotten through some of the mental issues I had with losing weight and started to gain a little weight I actually started to feel a little better about myself. I bought lots of new clothes as all my clothes were baggy and shapeless and my new clothes helped to heighten my confidence. I bought a beautiful skirt that had a zip right up the middle that could be unfastened both from the top and the bottom. The skirt was great until the zip started to play up. One morning, wearing the aforementioned skirt and tottering happily to work in heels that were clearly dangerous to someone as seemingly accident prone as I am a builder caught my eye as I walked past. He grinned and said ‘morning darlin’! ‘and I smiled in a way that I thought would perhaps be coquettish and said ‘Good morning to you too’. As I walked to work, several men eyed me up and down and I was sort of surprised but was enjoying the attention. Anyway, I got halfway to work before I thought ‘hang on, I’m not all that, why are so many people being so nice to me today?’. I looked down and to my horror I found that the zip had leapt its way to the top of the skirt and it was barely clinging to me at all! As I mentioned before I have a morbid fear of tights and the whole creeping down the body palaver so I always wore stockings and on this day they were fishnet stockings and I was also wearing very tight black lacy panties. I think there was initial shock then the hurried zipping up of the skirt while blushing profusely as I mentally worked out exactly how many people must have thought that I was some kind of exhibitionist. It wouldn’t have been so bad but I worked out my terrible wardrobe error at the train station in front of a crowd of bemused looking commuters!

The previous situation wouldn’t have been half as bad if it hadn’t been followed a few days subsequent to this by another skirt wrapping itself around my ears as the wind blew it up like Marilyn Monroe without the glamour. So yet again, Haymarket station got a good view of another item of my underwear drawer.

Then there was the bra that would spring itself open if one of my friends touched my shoulder! It was always one particular friend, I used to think that perhaps he had a magnet up his sleeve and was somehow performing a trick worthy of an escapologist – sort of a proxy escapologist as it was my chest that seemed to want to do the escaping!

There was the crocheted cardigan that managed to entangle itself around the lock on my bathroom door and rendered me incapable of movement for half an hour.

I had a beautiful satin blouse that seemed to think that my bra was attractive enough for everyone to view and without my knowledge would pop open button by button until I had to ask a platonic friend to monitor the situation and alert me should it reach critical.

Those are just the embarrassing items of clothing, I haven’t even begun to unfold the tales of the violence of the slacks, the terrible tale of the of the tumble down Arthurs Seat or the cowboy boots that forced me to meet my friends’ parents in a state of shock and filth.

Every pair of trousers, jeans etc that I have ever owned seem to magically grow and shrink as I wear them. Thus meaning that I feel that I don’t need a belt at the start of the day and later they end up hacking the inside of my thighs to bits as they sink lower and lower until I am hoisting them up every five minutes.

It was suggested to me that I should try a thong; I was told that as underwear goes they are sexy and comfy...I’m afraid that I found them as sexy as being sawn in half and they were by far and away the most uncomfortable things I have ever worn – and that’s saying something! On the two occasions I wore a thong I ended up going home and resorting to the comfy pants within an hour of trying them. Maybe they are comfy for women whose bottoms are tiny and peachy but with my voluptuous buttocks I’ll stick to the safe option.

As for the tumble down Arthurs Seat; I was taking a walk with a friend of mine in Edinburgh about ten years ago and he suggested climbing Arthurs Seat. Now, to say that I unsuitably attired for what he had in mind would be an understatement, I was wearing a long dress with stockings underneath and a pair of boots with ridiculous heels but he assured me that it wasn’t too bad a walk. Although he had lived in Edinburgh most of his life this experience didn’t seem to extend to walking up the huge hill as he took me the wrong way and we almost ended up rock climbing – and as you can imagine, in heels that’s not an easy feat! Anyway, halfway up we found the easier way to get up and we finally made it to the top. It was amazing! It was cold and incredibly windy, but amazing. We took in the scenery then decided to go down the easier way. It was still quite a trek and my friend gleefully ran down the sloping grassy hill shrieking with delight as he did so. Not wishing to be outdone I followed suit. Running in heels is not easy as any women will tell you but for some reason the boots hurled me forwards a lot quicker than I anticipated and I ended up almost cartwheeling down the hill! My dress went over my head on the first rotation and all of the shocked hikers around the hill were treated to the sight of my underwear again! The worst thing was that I tumbled for quite a distance so I wasn’t able to even regain my dignity until I had collapsed at the bottom laughing – well, let’s face it, when you have publicly humiliated yourself what else can you do?

Then there were the cowboy boots that wanted to ensure that meeting my friend’s parents would be memorable to them for all the wrong reasons. It was my friend’s birthday and he had invited me to a wonderful little cafe that served the sort of food that I had never experienced (I had to ask what a guinea fowl was). I wasn’t really sure what to wear, smart or casual? In the end I plumped for a glitzy top with a pair of jeans and my new cowboy boots. Pleased as punch with my outfit I strutted down to the city centre. Unfortunately as I got down to Princes Street it had been raining a little and the cowboy boots I was wearing didn’t have anything in the way of grip and as I stepped onto the curb after crossing the road and I lost my footing. I hit the wet paving with quite a thud, scuffing the skin from my elbows and palms as well as muddying my jeans and grazing both my knees. A lady picked me up and I tried to sort myself out but I was shaking and bleeding and very muddy. When I met up with my friend my exact words were ‘I’ve had a bit of an accident...’ and he smiled as he is used to me being generally accident prone and he led me in the direction of the cafe. So, on meeting his parents I had to decline the handshaking and shakily explain that I had to go and clean myself up. I remember standing in the toilets dabbing ineffectually at my bleeding knees with wet tissue paper and thinking ‘great, now they’re going to think I’m a complete idiot!’. Hopefully they didn’t but I certainly thought twice about wearing those boots again.

With a similar pair of boots I managed to go over on my ankle and hurtle down the stone steps at Edinburgh zoo leaving me bruised and laughing at the bottom – my friend who was with me couldn’t pick me up for laughing!

On Valentine’s day many years ago I was happily walking to university when the sandals I was wearing broke in half on one side and, as I was halfway between home and university and there was no bus service between the two I had to hop about 2 miles home at which point I realised that I had forgotten my keys and I had to ring the doorbell desperately hoping that my landlord or landlady were in so I didn’t have to sit outside with one sandal on. Thankfully they opened the door and I started my journey again with sensible if ill matched footwear.

So you see, I think my clothes and shoes are on a mission to thoroughly disgrace me. As I write this I am happily wearing a pair of pyjamas having thrown off my clothes as soon as I came in this afternoon and I have still felt the need to cover the web cam on my netbook to ensure that it doesn’t magically switch on with a sensor in the monkeys face on the pyjama top and reveal my chest to all the people on my account! The next time you see a girl who has tucked her skirt in her pants or has lost the ‘beauty tape’ on her revealing dress, please tell her immediately and have a heart – it’s the attack of the clothes! :)