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

[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...