How to dress for your body type? This is how.
This post has been a long time brewing in my heart. Little did I know many years ago when I started sewing up clothing in my beachside home where this road would take me. I am going to be very honest and bare my soul a bit here. A part of this business of designing clothing has made me a little sad. You see, throughout the years of dressing women and fitting them into my clothing I have heard way too much “body shame” to remain silent any longer. This talk comes from all shapes and sizes of women. This comes from the small ones and the large ones. Frankly it pretty much has come from all of you. Yes, its also comes from me.
In starting my recent campaign to raise funds to re-launch my clothing line Salts I had to step immensely out of my comfort zone. I had to talk about my life on camera, I had to tell many of my secrets. I also had to twirl and skip on camera (watch that here). This dug into my self esteem and got me thinking about these standards we hold ourselves to and how we are programmed to think we would look better if we had a little more here and a little less there. Where did this idea that there is a mould that we should fill come from? I think it came from the women before us allowing themselves to say the same things. We heard our mothers, grandmothers, aunts and older friends talk that way about their bodies. That is how it all became the way we as a gender talk about our bodies. I think its time we stopped, together.
We all have a body and very few of us have the perfect one that mass media would have us believe we should have. Its time to embrace what we are packing and flaunt it. I have worked hard over the years listening to women and what feels good to them in clothing. I love the work that I do to nurture women to wear divine fabrics and develop a unique but wearable personal style. My dream is to see a shift in how women see their bodies. We could evolve to a place where we dress right for our bodies but don’t judge what we have in a negative way anymore. Together we could make a choice to only say good things from now on, remembering that life is too short to be so hard on ourselves.
I promise I will try to love my body if you promise you will try the same.
Jennifer @Salts