Fashion’s Uncomfortable Garments

There comes a point in every woman’s life when she looks in the mirror and thinks, “Why am I doing this to myself?” For me, that moment of clarity has arrived as I approach my 60th birthday, and it involves two longtime antagonists: pantyhose and high heels.

Some of my earliest memories take me back to my grandmother Maggie Mae Lanier’s bedroom in the early 1970s. She and my Aunt Colleen lived in a small farmhouse north of Metter, near Stocking Head Creek, which is a tributary of Fifteenmile Creek. There I’d sit, wide-eyed on their bed, watching as she and my aunt performed what seemed like an Olympic sport — squeezing themselves into girdles before repeating the whole exhausting process with pantyhose. Meanwhile, there wasn’t a fraction of an ounce of excess fat on my little lean body. My child-self enjoyed the freedom of bare legs — tan, blemish-free, broken-veinfree and blissfully unconfined. Those were the days!

Of course, Sunday church meant “dressing up for the Lord,” which inevitably included pantyhose for us girls. The cheap K-Mart or Zayre stockings never stood a chance against my active, Tom-boyish nature — most developed toe-to-crotch runs during their very first wearing. And finding the right shade? Impossible. The “tan” color made my legs much darker than my fair arms and face, while “nude” was perpetually out of stock in my size.

High heels entered my life in ninth grade when Mom finally relented after years of warnings that I would “break my neck wearing them.” The occasion? A basketball banquet. The shoes? Two-inch wonders that made me feel like I’d stepped straight out of a fashion magazine. I paired the two-inch pumps with a skirt and blouse Mom had lovingly created on her trusty Sears Kenmore sewing machine. Walking up to accept my goldplated MVP trophy without falling on my face felt like a victory equal to winning the award itself.

Then came my engineering career in the 1990s and 2000s, where the corporate uniform demanded daily heel-and-hose torture. Isn’t it ironic? You spend your childhood desperate to look and act grown-up, only to discover adulthood’s fashionable constraints are a genuine pain in the you know what!

I’ve always prioritized comfort in my wardrobe choices — often buying a size larger just to avoid anything clinging to my body. My work-fromhome uniform consists of shorts and t-shirts in summer, loose cozy warmups in wintertime. But social obligations still occasionally force me back into formal attire, complete with those twin tormentors.

Let me be clear: I hate panty hose and high-heeled shoes with all the passion of a thousand burning suns. Heels especially are so painful that even after removing them, I must manually reshape my poor, deformed feet with my hands — adding insult to literal injury.

At least Grandmother and Aunt Colleen’s girdles have evolved into somewhat more bearable “shapers” like Spanx or Shapermint. I purchased my first pair last year for my brother’s wedding. The experience wasn’t entirely awful, and the confidence boost was quite welcome. As Mom often says, “Aging is not for the faint of heart” — especially when your body begins rearranging itself in ways you never ever anticipated.

So while those pantyhose and heels still occupy real estate in my closet (probably plotting their revenge against me), they’re firmly in my rearview mirror as I enter my sixties. Call it wisdom, call it rebellion, or simply call it common sense, but these days, you’ll find me embracing the sweet freedom of sweatpants and flipflops. After all, I’ve earned the right to choose comfort over convention. And my toes? They’ve never been happier.