Fat Guy Fashion 101
This week we’re talking about the odd fashion options for chubsters such as myself
Hello! Welcome back to Moronitude. We’re going to be doing our best to keep things light today, especially considering that we’re likely to have another heavy week in front of us. Speaking of heavy… let’s talk about fat guy fashion, shall we?
For as long as I remember I’ve been overweight. There are photos of me as a skinny toddler, but I have no memory of this whatsoever, in the same way that I don’t really remember being blonde. While my weight has fluctuated wildly over the years, once I crossed that line into being overweight I pretty much stayed there.
As such, I’ve always had a very skewed view towards fashion, both in what I wear and the things I avoid. I know that many of the biggest trends, like skinny jeans, would look horrendous upon me.
Sometimes this is totally fine. I don’t need to wear tank tops around, thank you very much. But other times it’s a bummer, like when I tried to find a cool-ass leather jacket as a youngster.
I thought it might be kind of fun to go over some of the odder bits of how I’ve approached fashion over the years, including the annoying issue that seems like it will never go away.
The Husky Section
I’m convinced that the only true purpose of the husky section is to shame the kids who have to shop there. Husky is one of the English languages ugliest words to hear. It is repulsive. Say it out loud. It made the hairs on your neck stand up, right?
I dreaded when my mom would take me to JC Penny or Capwell’s or frickin’ Mervyn’s (I despised Mervyn’s for reasons I cannot recall, but I still kinda hate them even though they’ve been dead since 2008) to go clothes shopping. Not because I hated clothes shopping, but because I knew at some point I wouldn’t be able to squeeze into anything in the normal kids section and would be forced to turn to the H. If a kid from school saw me in the husky section that would be it. The end of what little social life I had been able to cobble together at 10. I’d get called Husky Charlie or Chuck Husky. There’s no chance in hell I’d ever live that down.
As such, once we were in the husky section I did everything within my ability to get out of there in a hurry. “Does this shirt fit? Yeah? I don’t care what’s on it, let’s get to stepping.”
Trying to Avoid the Fat Guy Tropes
Don’t wear shorts in the winter. Avoid Hawaiian shirts. Flat caps are a problem. Never, ever wear the matching athletic suit that is tight enough to show that you are as far from athletic as possible. Be super careful to avoid having a super short tie because your neck is too damn big.
There are so many ways of dressing that fall into the fat guy stereotype that I do my best to avoid. Some of them, like wearing sweatpants out in public, are very hard to avoid doing. Sweatpants are the best! But as much as I hate to admit she was right, my fiancée was not wrong when she told me that wearing sweats in public is akin to advertising that I’ve given up on life.
Accessories Rule
One of the drawbacks to being a chonk is that a lot of the cool clothes you want aren’t going to come in your size. And when they do, they do so in limited quantities. This is particularly true when you’re in the midwest where everybody makes a XXL, but you can be goddamn sure it’s going to sell out first.
This is where accessories come in. For me this means hats. So many hats. There may not be any band shirts in my size but I can easily fit into that beanie. Over the years this led to me becoming a hat fanatic. This led to some really questionable choices. Like the time I desperately wanted a bowler for some unfathomable reason. The only logical explanation I can imagine is that I had never actually seen myself wearing a bowler.
But it has also led to some of my all-time favorite articles of clothing. The Prime Skateboards hat with a chopped up cartoon pig. My Seattle Rainiers hat. The Russian winter hat I have that I only break out every couple of years thanks to global warming getting rid of weather cold enough to wear it without breaking into an immediate sweat. Every iteration of my disgustingly overworn Red Sox hat.
I don’t think I ever realized the reason I was so into hats until recently. It’s because whenever I see a hat I want I know that I can both find it in my size and that it will look good. None of my various body insecurity gets in the way.
Of course, my love of hats is probably why I’m bald…
When You Find Something That Works, Stick With It
I have worn the exact same pants for the last 20 years. Not the same pair, mind you, but the same two styles of corduroy pants. They fit well and look not horrendous, and at the end of the day, that’s all I’m really going for here. If LL Bean goes out of business I may have to stop wearing pants completely.
Clothes That Fit Don’t Seem to Fit
For pretty much all of my life I’ve been wearing clothes that don’t fit. As a fat man my great fear is that I’m going to be out in public, having a nice time, blissfully unaware of the large, fleshy bit of flank hanging out. And it really is a fear. I’ve spent more than a few hours of my life in front of the mirror simulating how I’ll look holding the rail on the subway to make sure nothing is poking out.
As such, I end up wearing clothes that are too big for me, which is a delightful piece of irony. I can’t find clothes that fit so I move into husky or big and tall sections (SEE! We could have just avoided using the H word in the first place, it’s clearly meant as psychological warfare). While there I buy clothes that also don’t fit, but because they are too big for me. When I see clothes that hide the Peanut M&M-esque shape of my body I pounce on them. But this doesn’t look good either. It looks like I’m wearing some sort of fashionable tarp, which is most definitely an oxymoron.
When I buy a shirt that actually fits the way it’s supposed to I’m completely convinced it is too small. I’ll pull at it and try to stretch it out, which, when successful, leads to a bad look too. Deprogramming my brain to stop doing this is a work in progress. I lost a little bit of weight earlier in the year (which I feel like I’ve gained some of back, but not all) and it gave me the ounce of confidence I needed to wear some things I normally wouldn’t. These are clothes that fit, I just convinced myself they didn’t. It’s really stupid but also incredibly hard to unlearn.
One of these days corduroy pants, hats and billowy fashion tarps will become the rage, but until they do I’ll just be here trying to figure out a way to not look hideous.
Weekly Song to Rock Out To
How Bizarre by OMC
I’ve always wanted to be a hype man. But not a Flavor Flav-esque hype man, I wanted to be more subtle about it, which probably goes against the very idea of being a hype man at all. Basically, I want to be part of the band while putting in remarkably little effort. I’ll just hang out, look cool and then, at the moment people least expect it, utter a line that takes the song from “good” to “an iconic cultural moment.”
For years and years, I thought the dude chilling in the back of the car in the “How Bizarre” video was the guy that says the really quick “Every time I look around!” during the chorus. To me, this is the epitome of cool. You hang out with your friends, they do all the heavy lifting, then you jump in with the secret sauce that everybody was craving. But while I was “researching” this section I learned that the dude in the back doesn’t say anything at all! He just gets mentioned in the second line of the song and disappears. Yet, a couple decades later, he’s still living in my head rent free. This is what I actually want. I don’t want to be the hype man, I want to be the guy chilling in the back of the convertible in the “How Bizarre” video. If I could do it all over again I would put this into my college essays.
Charlie’s History Corner
William Henry Harrison
It’s inauguration week, so why not look back on the single dumbest inauguration in the history of the American presidency?
William Henry Harrison was a notable president for many reasons. He was the last president to be born as a British subject. He was the first Whig to be elected president. He was the oldest president (68) at the start of their term, a distinction he would hold until Reagan was elected at the age of 69 (still not nice). He’s the only president to have a grandson also elected president. And, most notably, he’s the only president stupid enough to give a two hour speech in bitter cold and rain without wearing a coat.
The weather on inauguration day was overcast, cold (48°) and incredibly windy. Normally, the president-elect would ride to the inauguration in a carriage, wear proper clothing and limit their time out in the elements. Harrison wanted no part of this.
You see, the now elderly Harrison had once been a war hero. He had campaigned on the line “Tippecanoe and Tyler Too,” a reference to his victory in the battle of Tippecanoe and his vice president. A victory that he capped off by burning down Prophetstown and all of the food the citizens had stored for winter. Oh, and then Harrison’s men dug up the village cemetery and desecrated the corpses, leaving them strewn about. Pretty cool guy if you ask me.
Now that he had been elected, he wanted to show that he was still the big toughie that he was back when he was forcing women and children into starvation. So he rode his horse out in the weather. And he didn’t need a coat or hat or gloves, those things are for pussies, not big time war heroes like Harrison!
Then, to probe what a dynamo he was, Harrison talked. And talked. And talked. His speech was just shy of 9,000 words. Believe it or not this was the edited version. If he had his druthers it would have been even longer. His secretary of state, Daniel Webster, wasn’t enthused about the long diatribes into Roman history Harrison had in the original draft. After cutting a ton of it out of the speech, Webster returned home looking worse for wear. His wife inquired as to what was the matter and he said, “I have killed seventeen Roman proconsuls as dead as smelts, every one of them!” Which sounds way cooler than saying “I edited out a bunch of stuff about Roman history” and I shall be using this tactic to describe my job from here on out.
Once he was finally done talking, Harrison bundled up in front a fire and warmed up. Wait, no he didn’t. He party hopped all night long, taking in all of the festivities and enjoying a few libations. Being the talk of the town is a perk that many presidents enjoy for four whole years. Harrison enjoyed them for about a month.
Thirty-one days later Harrison would be dead from either pneumonia or typhoid fever. Or possibly from all the bloodletting doctors did since medicine in the 1840s was a big ‘ol crap shoot.
One common misconception is that Harrison caught the illness that would eventually kill him during his big day of poor sense, but this just isn’t true. He didn’t develop any symptoms for close to three weeks after the inauguration. But why let facts get in the way of a good story, particularly when it can be used by generations of mothers to tell their children they better wear a coat?
Harrison’s entire presidency can be summed up in five words: Didn’t wear a coat, died. That’s not great! That’s not the kind of mark on the country you want to leave once you’ve been elected to the highest office in the land. There is one silver lining to this story for Harrison—he never had to see that his presidency became nothing more than a punchline. Of course, he didn’t see it because he was dead, which one could argue isn’t a silver lining at all. But let’s be positive, eh?
Things to Read
Trump is quite literally in a rush to kill as many people as possible before he leaves office. This is a very interesting look into one of the 13 federal inmates executed in the past six months. https://www.gq.com/story/trump-administration-death-row-dustin-higgs
This one is actually something to listen to from the latest episode of On the Media. They had previously done a story about Zello and how it was being used by militia types, this follow up looks at how exactly Zello was used during the insurrection. https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/otm/segments/zello-tapes-walkie-talkie-app-used-during-insurrection-on-the-media
By the middle of this week we’ll have a new president. Finally. While lately we’ve been focusing on all of the heinous things Trump has done while in office, this Twitter thread looks back at all the profoundly weird things he did. This truly may be the oddest presidency of all time. I will never not laugh at Trump in the truck acting like the biggest boy.
A check in on Charlie’s sports sanity
Hockey season started this week! Yay! Let’s get ready for some Chicago Blackhawks hock… hold on. They’re already down 3-0? Shit. In the first two games the Hawks (which is the name they should go by in the future with the jerseys modified so as to get rid of the current logo, but that’s another fight for another time) were outscored 10-3 in the first two games of the season. Not exactly an inspiring start. Well, at least they put up 3.
And the Bears managed to not fire anybody. We’re just going to keep on rolling with the pack of bozos that brought us here. COOOOOOOL.
Don’t watch sports, boys and girls.
Thank you for reading Moronitude! Tell your friends! Enjoy the new president!