Sexy: Bods laid bare
Summer’s coming; time for girls and women to shed their comforting wintry layers.
RAPPERS AND TENNIS players are the most blessed of blokes; lightly enveloped by cool, flapping volumes of excess fabric. Big pants, huge shirts, ginormous jackets. Yo! ‘Sup! Snug and smug. Of all the members of that gender notoriously coy about showing off its fiddly bits, rappers and tennis players are the coy-est of them all. And boys are so-ooo coy! In summer, only sleeves and the lower portion of jeans and trousers are shed, and still the look and feel of cool is perfectly preserved. Lucky lads. No big or little bulges on show, no scrawny ribcage or slack backside revealed for scrutiny and criticism.
Calm is the fundamental difference between the typical boy-psyche and the typical girl-psyche, particularly at this climatically ticklish time of year. As one gender twists and spins and frets before a zillion bedroom mirrors - “My hips are too big/tits too floppy/skin too blotchy/arms too wobbly/legs too chunky/neck too short/toes too stubby . . .” - the other bounds, reckless as a puppy, into the sizzling hot summertime, oblivious to the wardrobe dilemmas they DON’T have.
Ah, yes. If I had a Choo for every “I loathe summer - I feel naked in the clothes” (or words to that effect) I hear from lip-glossed lips around this time of year, I’d be a well-shod woman indeed. This is a marvellous fashion era for sexy-sexy flawless girls and pathological extroverts, but for the rest of us summer’s practical bias to skimpy things makes us jittery by November and fear-stricken come Christmas.
It’s all so - revealing.
Only with compromise comes comfort: a darker shade to disguise this, a less fashionable, more voluminous cut to conceal that. Designers who know the fragility of the female psyche and use that knowledge like a wand are canonised by a pathetically grateful market: John Cavill, Lisa Barron, Thomaiy, David Lawrence, Jigsaw, Veronika Maine, Trelise Cooper, Witchery, Sportsgirl, Sussan. The lack of Dinnigans, Scanlan & Theodores, Morrisseys and Sass & Bides among them speaks volumes about the disciplinary nature of sky-high fashion.
Dressing cool and cool in summer is especially hard for teenage girls. Fashion is life-affirming and never mind the figure “faults”. Spaghetti straps, boob-tubes, baby-doll frocks; what else can they wear? And how brave - despite those carping critics who went on and on and bloody on for 10 seasons of low-slung hipsters about “muffin tops” and “sponge bellies” - that they persevere! In September we got a hint about how genuinely problematic skimpy clothes can be when a bipartisan federal Senate committee reported that some girls abandon their sporting passions simply to avoid the two bits of Lycra they’re handed to wear as “uniforms” as adult players.
Funny, isn’t it? You could cut three beach volleyball bikinis from one boy’s volleyball shorts, or six sexy girls’ hip-hop bra tops and shorts from one pair of rapper boy pants, or two tennis frocks from one tennis boy’s shorts or five
