Dear Prudence: I Got Accused of “Stealing” Clothes I Don’t Need at the Thrift Store.

[minoanmiss]

Content advisory: fatphobia, requests for justification for bigotry.


Q. Muumuu Murderer: I’m an artist and thus don’t make a lot of money, but I always manage to look fabulous thanks to thrift stores and my trusty sewing machine. My favorite thing to do is alter and embellish old garments since it takes a fraction of the time compared to sewing something from scratch. Larger garments are better for this since it gives you plenty of extra fabric to work with. Last week in my favorite store, I was just taking this enormous chiffon muumuu with the most over-the-top pink and green 80s print, priced at $5, up to the register when this woman I’d never seen before got up in my face and started angrily reaming me out for “stealing” plus sized clothes that I don’t need and “destroying” them. I was genuinely physically intimidated since she was at least three times my size, but I kept my cool and offered to let her buy the muumuu. But she declined, cussed me out one last time, and stomped out. I haven’t been able to stop flashing back to and obsessing over the incident. With such a glut of clothes ending up in the landfills and oceans of the world, is there really anything wrong with buying plus size thrift-store clothes and altering them to fit? I’m probably not going to stop—the ex-muumuu is now an adorable wrap dress with a matching shawl—but I at least want to know how bad I should feel.


A: First of all, you know as well as I do that this woman being “three times” your size—and it’s safe to say we’re not talking about height here—did not make you physically intimidated. Fat does not make people aggressive or good at fighting and it’s not a weapon. So calm down about that. Also, “I’m going to do it anyway because my cute outfits are more important than any point this woman may have made but I want to know how bad I should feel” is not a genuine request for advice. You apparently don’t have a dilemma here. Still, I’ll share a quote from the blog Dances With Fat that explains where the woman who screamed at you (

Which no, she should not have done! That was bad!

) was coming from:

The fact is that fat people—including and especially poor and/or superfat people—don’t simply have the freedom to only choose clothes that we like or that are “on trend.” Sadly, often we have to choose the clothing that vaguely covers our body, even if it’s not quite professional enough for the job interview, or dressy enough for the wedding, or a color we like, or exactly the right size. The fact that all of that is phenomenally messed up is the subject for (many!) other posts. For today I’ll point out that the solution is to change the clothing industry, not our bodies.

The bottom line when it comes to “repurposing” plus size clothes is that they already have a valid purpose, and that purpose is to clothe plus size people. If there were more than enough plus size clothes in thrift shops I would have no problem with thin people (who, by the way, already have a metric ass-ton more options in thrift stores in their size than fat people do that they could ‘re-purpose’) re-designing these clothes. But the truth is that buying the few clothes that exist to fit fat people, and turning them into even more clothing that fits thin people is an act of privilege that adds to oppression, so while I can’t stop people from doing it, I really wish they wouldn’t.”

Is buying up these larger clothes the worst act in the entire world? I don’t think so, particularly if you’re also short on cash and grabbing one carefully selected item here and there rather than greedily scooping up the entire plus size section. But your “This big, horrible fat woman scared me and I’m not even going to consider doing anything that might make life easier for plus size people” attitude sucks, and that’s what you should feel very bad about, especially if it shows up in your life outside of thrift stores.

Comments

[minoanmiss]

I might have opinions about this one, and I'm trying very hard not to hope that something befalls LW that makes it impossible for her to "look fabulous" for long enough for her to learn that she's not a superior lifeform to women "three times [her] size". Ugh. Just... ugh.

[ethelmay]

I went looking for "refashionista" (mentioned in the Dances With Fat blog post quoted above), and am genuinely sad to say she's dead. Ovarian cancer, 39. No one deserves that.

[minoanmiss]

Ow. Life is uncertain, and fuck cancer.

[ermingarden]

Despite being a fat person who shops at thrift stores and is thus perpetually frustrated at the dearth of secondhand plus-size clothes...I don't think LW is doing anything wrong by buying clothes with the intent of altering (or "repurposing") them.

What LW does need to stop doing is being tremendously obnoxious.

[torachan]

No, it's an asshole move on her part. She has way more options for clothing. By taking the plus sized stuff, she is making it even harder for people who actually need larger clothes to find something in their size.

[lilysea]

I don't know what the situation is like in the US, but here in Australia it is ALMOST IMPOSSIBLE to find plus size clothing in Op Shops that is in good condition, let alone comfortable or presentable.

Almost all Op Shop clothing is Australian size 12 or less (US size 8 or less)

So I think what LW is doing is incredibly selfish and incredibly inconsiderate

[blueinkedfrost]

Due to the statistics around the truly massive waste of clothing, I think the advice is wrong. I know there are fewer plus sized clothing options available, but I'm not convinced of the idea that if small people refrained from remaking large garments, this would definitely cause said large garments to always go to the correct people and never go to landfill.

I suspect that OP is fictional.

[cimorene]

I sympathize with that and I don't think it's wrong to buy things that are offered for sale in good faith, unless she's also doing something like arriving early and combing the stores for them regularly. But at the same time, the overall amount of clothing going to landfills doesn't do anything to ameliorate the issue. There's a huge shortage of plus sized clothes in thrift stores, and after having worked at a thrift store in Finland I can say the shortage is probably global. They were asked after constantly and tended to even be priced higher, or let through with lower standards, due to the demand. Buying clothes, particularly femme ones, for plus size people new in the fast fashion society we now live in is actually sometimes impossible, in the sense that it becomes too much to afford or too far to travel to fill whatever functional need a plus size person might have. So yeah, I, personally, would want to make sure that if I bought one in a thrift store, it was one that had been sitting there unsold for a month and the people who might come looking for it had definitely had a chance to find it.

[cereta]

Thank you. I was going to say something like that, but now I don't have to ;).

[melannen]

I think it really depends. I have worked in sorting donated clothes around here, and at least as many plus sized things get unbought and thrown away as small sized things. But: that's an expansive definition of plus size, in my area XL is about as common as M (and stuff gets harder to find again once you're smaller than M), but anything above XXXL? Yeah, that's rare and precious, leave it for people who need it.

It's also an asshole move to buy a pair of good-condition designer jeans at a thrift store in order to cut them up and make something completely different, whether you're a tiny person looking to size them down or a large person looking to size them up. Leave the really good quality thrift finds to people who need good-quality, not home-altered clothes. The nice quality stuff in plus sizes gets rarer faster, too, partly because that's so much harder to find new, and so much more expensive than straight-size designer wear, so it's more likely to be in poor shape when donated, because XXXL people aren't buying stuff in boutiques on a whim and donating in unworn..

If you want stuff to cut up, buy the stuff nobody will want as-is, there is no shortage of worn XL t-shirts with boring logos on them at thrift stores.

I can't tell with LW what they mean by chiffon muumuu. If what they mean is the kind of fairly nice formalwear that plus size people get stuck wearing to weddings because nobody makes fitted dresses that work for them, leave it for the person who needs a dress for a wedding. If it's clearly twenty years out of style or it's more of a horrible caftan/housedress like thing, or it's got stains or tears that you can cut around if you size it down, then I wouldn't think twice.

But the more I think about this letter the more I suspect it actually was a fairly nice mother-of-bride type formal dress that LW is describing as a muumuu just to make it sound worse, in which case they're an ass and they should stop. (Or it is a retelling of an internet interaction re-set in person to make it seem worse; I can't imagine any heavy person I know hassling a thin person just for buying plus sizes because people buy clothes for. other people? Unless LW was making a huge fatphobic production in the store about how they were going to cut down this ugly thing to make something that would fit real people. Which is also possible.)

[minoanmiss]

I can't imagine any heavy person I know hassling a thin person just for buying plus sizes because people buy clothes for. other people? Unless LW was making a huge fatphobic production in the store about how they were going to cut down this ugly thing to make something that would fit real people. Which is also possible.)

I suspect this is more how the situation went. There *are* people of whatever size who will walk up to a stranger and scold them but I think LW put more into the interaction than she cites.

[ethelmay]

Clearly LW thought the "over-the-top pink and green 80s print" was perfectly fine, even "adorable," when it was on LW. So it sounds as though it could have been an acceptable garment as it was.

I get the impression that there are still people going around telling each other that fat people shouldn't wear bright colors or bold patterns, which I think of as something from my mother's generation (my mother got over that idea).

[minoanmiss]

This seems to me to be related to the idea that large size clothes should cost two or three times as much because they use more cloth per item. Clothing waste isn't disproportionately the fault of larger wearers, especially considering how much wasted clothing is "fast fashion" that doesn't show up in our sizes anyway.

I suspect that OP is fictional.

They might be but the thrifting procedure they describe really isn't, alas.

[blueinkedfrost]

That is a good point about fast fashion and clothing waste. It's unlikely that clothing waste is disproportionately the 'fault' of people who take larger sizes.

[firecat]

I don’t think thrifting large clothing is a particularly horrid practice, but my reaction to this?

I haven’t been able to stop flashing back to and obsessing over the incident.

…is: Good.

[shirou]

I’m perplexed by the columnist’s opening. Is it not credible that being yelled at by a larger person could feel intimidating? I don’t have much experience thrifting or know anything about this issue, but that opening gives me the impression the columnist is very biased.

[cereta]

Is that person taller, and larger in a way that indicates superior strength, or are they just fatter? The former is entirely logical. The latter is ridiculous.

[shirou]

I don’t find it ridiculous that LW might feel intimidated by a much larger person acting threatening, even if fat accounts for most the size difference. It might not be logical, but first reactions to stressful situations sometimes aren’t. The columnist’s assumptions and dismissiveness make me question the columnist’s objectivity.

[melannen]

Yeah, while fatphobia is definitely a thing and fat people are definitely not more likely to be violent than anyone else and LW is definitely being an ass about how they wrote the letter - sheer size *is* an advantage in a physical fight, and I *am* going to be more intimated by somebody twice my weight than somebody half my weight, whether that extra weight is height or fat or muscle. And every large person I know (and every small person I know) is aware of this in their body-language interactions. So it's pretty disingenuous of Prudence to just outright deny that a large person deliberately using aggressive body language couldn't possibly result in LW feeling physically intimidated. They probably did feel physically intimidated, and the size difference was probably a factor, and the person they were interacting with was probably using that deliberately. How to deal with the fact that size *does* change the intimidation factor, and how to handle that in a just way, is something that is an issue for large people of all types and I don't have an answer for.

It's also not particularly relevant to the question, and a better answer would have been to just leave it that the person screaming at you should not have done that and then moved on.

[lethe1]

Agreed.

[conuly]

I don't think it's ridiculous at all. I wouldn't think it was ridiculous even if LW was clear that this person was much *smaller* than they are, in all possible ways.

It's reasonable to be intimidated by somebody who gets into your personal space and berates you.

[minoanmiss]

Admittedly I'm looking at this from the viewpoint of having been told that I'm So Intimidating, at 5 foot tall and high-voiced, because I'm fat and Black, but no, I don't find LW credible. Her description smacks of "this horrible blob monster Attacked Me instead of knowing its place beneath me"

[haggis]

Hard agree.

I feel pretty sure that someone is using their physical size as a weapon in this argument but I don't think it was the fat person.

[cereta]

That's my perspective, too: 5' 1/2", admittedly possessed of teacher voice. If someone said they found me intimidating because I was in their face? Fair cop. If they said I was intimidating because I weighed more than they do? Fuck off.

[lilysea]

Yes, I'm fat, but I've been told that between my facial expressions and my body language I am not even a little bit intimidating, and that's before I even developed chronic pain, chronic fatigue and got a wheelchair...

[topaz_eyes]

With such a glut of clothes ending up in the landfills and oceans of the world, is there really anything wrong with buying plus size thrift-store clothes and altering them to fit?

How about learning how to alter or re-make clothing from your size range instead, as our grandparents and great-grandparents used to do when clothing was scarce and/or rationed? Granted it's more challenging because you don't have the fabric leeway. But LW, all you're doing is contributing to the scarcity of necessary clothing items for an entire group of people while the glut of smaller-size clothing simply increases.

Most of all, LW, you need to fix your shitty attitude towards plus-size people.

[melannen]

>>How about learning how to alter or re-make clothing from your size range instead, as our grandparents and great-grandparents used to do when clothing was scarce and/or rationed?

It's a nice thought, but our grandparents and great-grandparents also strongly preferred to start with a larger size and work down in alterations. There's a reason really small clothes are much more common vintage and in museums too, and it's because most of the large size ones got cut down until they were either too tiny to cut down anymore or completely worn out.

That said I've seen some amazing plus-size thrifting blogs that combine multiple smaller pieces into one amazing large one, and our ancestors did do that too (it is more work though.)

Also LW does indeed need to fix their shitty attitude.

[ashbet]

I don’t even bother thrift-shopping for anything but accessories, for just this reason (and I’m on the smaller end of plus.)

What the LW is doing is a known problem that adds to the scarcity of available, affordable clothing for larger people — and her attitude is rotten.

I hope she steps on a Lego.

[lilysea]

I hope she steps on a Lego

You're more generous than me - I hope her body permanently changes so that she needs plus sized clothes and realises just how hard it is to find plus sized clothes at Op Shops...

[ashbet]

I’m reluctant to frame a fat body as a punishment, bc body size SHOULD be neutral, but I hear you on the thought process.

I do hope that thrift stores close their doors to her.