(Picture: Ella Byworth for Metro.co.uk)

My relationship with fashion got off to a rocky start.

Despite being a normal size 10/12 in my middle to late teens, I had decided that I was fat.

I was also 5”7 with a 5 foot best friend (she’s wonderful, but her tininess does mean that I look like Gandalf next to a Hobbit when we stand together) and was surrounded by people who were a size 4.

My friends would waif around trying on bikinis and hot pants and slinky dresses while I, despite being a perfectly normal size, was relegated to the dark, miserable area of ‘flattering’.


Flattering meant corduroy a-line skirts. Wrap dresses. V-neck jumpers. Bootleg jeans.



Which was great, because what teenager doesn’t want to look like a 43 year old woman named Sue who’s debating buying a new Volvo?

(Picture: Ella Byworth for Metro.co.uk)

This, my friends, was the era of Trinny and Suzanna. It was a time when women, even teenagers, were told that they had to dress ‘for your body type’. Your clothes had to be flattering.

As far as I can tell, flattering is a nice way of saying that a garment hides all your s**t qualities. Makes you look less fat.

Now, there have been plenty of times when I wanted to look less fat, but swathing myself in a heavy jersey fabric with an a-line silhouette did not do that. It just made me look like the exact same person, but in fancy dress as a Geography supply teacher.

Flattering clothes are, broadly speaking a myth. If you have fat on your body, that fat will remain on your body whether you wear something ‘flattering’ or not. What flattering really describes is hiding. Keeping your shameful, disappointing fatness under wraps so that no-one is obliged to see how disgusting you are, or be horrified by the reality that you have dared to have thighs.

Weirdly, the concept of what is flattering isn’t even universal.

(Picture: Ella Byworth for Metro.co.uk)

Before the bottom revolution of the 00’s (thank you Beyonce and Kim) women wanted to hear ‘no’ in answer to the question ‘does my bum look big in this?’ Lily Allen once said in an interview that her signature 50’s dress and trainers look was designed to ‘hide’ her ‘fat arse’.

Flattering ten years ago meant having no butt. Now it means leggings which display its glorious largeness.

How are we even supposed to keep up?

What doesn’t change is this constant and totally false concept that clothes have some kind of control over you, like they can engineer your body. Spoiler alert: they can’t.

Shopping recently, a shop assistant told me ‘that dress really gives you a waist’.

It didn’t. My waist, which is nine inches smaller than my hips, gives me a waist. The dress, which was made of fabric and wasn’t a corset, just sat on top of what was already there.

(Picture: Ella Byworth fro metro.co.uk)

There are a billion ways to compliment a garment. The print, the fabric, the pattern, the period it reminds you of, the shape, the colour – the list is basically endless. But please take a moment to think about what a weird description ‘flattering’ really is.



When you tell someone that an item they’re trying on is ‘flattering’ what you’re saying is ‘I realise that there are many crap things about your body, but this dress does actually mask some of those crap things, so other people who are meeting you for the first time might find themselves unaware of the crap things about your body and those who already know you and have registered the crap things might be confused by this garment or even believe that you have lost weight.’

It’s not really a compliment. If it’s a compliment to anyone it’s the dress maker, not the wearer, and even then it’s pretty scant.

There is nothing wrong with your body, whatever it looks like, and wearing clothes should be about choosing things you love, things that make you feel like a spy or a heroine in a 1930’s detective novel or Meryl Streep in Devil wears Prada. Getting dressed should be about picking the items that make you feel like the person you want to be today.

Not about trying to hide the fact you had a second bread roll with dinner last night.

So f**k flattering.

Flattering is bollocks. Please start shopping for sexy, glamorous, comfortable, warm or IT HAS POCKETS. But not for flattering.

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