Reflections from a Dressing Room
Recently, I went shopping with women friends and once again reveled in the magical enclave called dressing rooms. It makes no thread of difference whether the dressing room is in a department or discount store. A boutique or a thrift shop. This women-only space creates an intimate one-of-a-kind type of connection I’ve rarely experienced elsewhere.
I’m not sure how to describe the camaraderie that manifests out of thin air in between these mirrored cubicles. Even in a dressing room by myself, I hear kinship all around me. Mothers and daughters, sisters by birth or by heart, and friends of all ages sharing with an ease and authenticity that’s both dynamic and comforting.
Snippets of supportive and congenial conversations drift over partitions, from exclamations of delight and appreciation to offerings of assurance and encouragement. Everyone there is privy to the generosity of women among women.
In that private space, insecurities are shared. How our bodies have changed over time. How our bellies belie our self-worth. We speak in intimacies, revealing ravages left behind from illness, surgery, and childbirth or just plain ol’ life. Baring souls and bodies, we admit how we often dress to hide when really we want to twirl and twirl in rainbow-colored skirts or never again wear an undergarment labeled “supportive.” A misnomer if ever there was one.
We laugh too. The best laughter to be found. The healing kind. The kind you never forget because, to this day, it still makes you laugh. Hilarity from the clothes themselves, including their fit, or should I say unfit? Cracking up over ensembles that make you look like Half Pint on “Little House on the Prairie,” or worse, a character on “Gilligan’s Island,” and by that I mean, Thurston Howell the Third.
Then there’s the ridiculousness of sizes; how a 6 and a 14 in different brands are exactly the same dimensions. Or it could be you can’t take off a dress you tried on. You’re stuck with your arms straight up in the air and the skirt over your head. I’m not saying this happened to me once, because it’s happened repeatedly. I can assure you, it gets funnier each time. But only when you’re with friends.
And it’s not just those I know. Women, who are strangers, have shared with me about themselves, their bodies, their hopes, their needs. They ask if they look okay for a first date, a job interview, a wedding or a funeral. It’s akin to holding someone’s hand. An opportunity to say something that matters.
Maybe that is the magic of women’s dressing rooms. They enable us to be seen when sometimes we can’t see ourselves. Especially without the lens of societal scrutiny of what we’re supposed to look like.
I saw an article last week that advised women to stop looking in mirrors at themselves in profile. Sure, it’s the quickest way to assess the size of our stomachs. Plus, a lifelong habit for many of us who were taught to critique ourselves from the side or back view because we were warned that is how others judge us. Though painful in its practice and impact, sadly, in our culture it’s a valid reality. The shame outside a dressing room is real. We’re told throughout our lives that we women are too big, too small, too much, too over-dressed, too under-dressed, too loose, too tight, too short, too long, etc. Clearly, too evaluated to simply be.
But inside that changing room, there are women who believe no such thing. Women who see and praise the beauty, the individuality and the fullness of other women. And, just maybe, this sisterhood of affirmation can help us all get a little closer to being, in Anne Lamott’s words, a constant tender-hearted wife to ourselves. Outside a dressing room.
IN MUSING by Carole Vasta Folley
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