I've lost my suspender belt. Well, actually, 'lost' is the wrong word: I know exactly where I last saw it, it was on a bedroom floor that I highly doubt I'll ever be anywhere near again. But whatever the cause, I no longer own one, and so I went into London to see what I could find. I started out in Agent Provocateur. Oh God, the pretty! I was highly distracted by the shop assistants, especially the one who kept adjusting her suspenders behind the counter. I couldn't keep up this level of sleaze for long, though, and soon admitted to myself that I really wasn't going to find anything in here I could even pretend to afford.
Suddenly, I remembered: last Christmas, my Grandma sent me a £20 Topshop voucher. Not being the sort of person who ever goes into Topshop (most of the things I wear tend to be either bought from Primark and customised, hand-me-downs from ex-goths with more money than I or charity shop finds) it had taken me till the last week of May to think about spending it.
I ventured into the flagship store on Oxford Street in Fear and Trembling and wandered around for a while. Despite the fact that it was 3pm on a dull Tuseday the place was packed with Beautiful People: I was the biggest person I saw in there by quite a long way - and one of the shortest, too. Trapped in a maze of lipgloss and denim and larger-than-lifesize portraits of Kate Moss I began to panic. 'You shouldn't be in here,' screamed the retro-print dresses and the lamé hotpants. 'You don't /belong/ in here. You're not one of the Beautiful People.'
I soon realised, of course, that if this was what Beautiful People looked like I was rather glad to not be one of them. One woman was wearing gold tights. Really. /Gold tights/. I don't just mean tights with a golden sheen: oh no, these were actual gold tights. You had to see them to beleive them. Perhaps even more terrifyingly, there was a marked overabundance of leggings in screamingly bright colours that made me want to put my sunglasses on. It felt rather like I'd fallen into some sort of bizarre version of the early Nineties that was /even worse/.
I headed towards the lingere section through a throng of squealing fifteen year old girls who looked at me as though I had two heads and began to sift through the mass of patterned scraps pretending to be bras. For some reason Laura Ashley wallpaper appears to be de rigeur at the moment. Another thing that seems to be de rigeur is having 28B breasts: I'm sorry, but I'm a Real Woman. Sighing and unsure why I expected to find a 38E in somewhere like Topshop anyway, I discarded the tiny bit of flowered cotton that seemed to be a combination of a pair of knickers and a suspender belt (seriously. What is the point of that?) and moved on.
Determined to buy something (I had a voucher, after all, and was by this time so angry with the entire shop that I'd started muttering to myself about how if I failed to get anything for the money my Grandma had already spent, They'd Won) I began to comb the entire shop from top to bottom. Gloves were made for people with long, thin fingers and slim hands. Tops were made for people with narrow shoulders and no boobs. Shoes were made for people with long, thin feet and (in the case of boots) no ankles or calves whatsoever. Jewlery was made for people with no nickel allergy and no taste.
I suppose I wouldn't mind so much if I had a really unusual body type. If I was a size forty with doctors yelling at me that it was Diet Or Die I could understand it. But I'm /not/. I'm a size eighteen (the second most common size amongst women in the UK, after a 16) with shortish but wide feet (I take about a seven, which is a fairly common size) and ex-dancer's legs (this is All Muscle, by the way, even after several years!) I'm overweight, yes - I certainly wouldn't argue with /that/ - but not ridiculously or even unusually so. I'll admit that my chest is rather on the large side and at 5'2" I'm rather shorter than is usual, but that's ok, if I couldn't find a suspender belt I'd have been looking for a skirt anyway, not a top or trousers.
I walked out in disgust an hour and a half later, still with the £20 voucher in my purse. I'm not sure what I'm going to do with it. I may give it to someone I really dislike as a present.
The next day, I poked the internet a little. All of fifteen minutes later, I recived an email confirming that my order for one suspender belt and four pairs of stockings was winging its way to me from What Katy Did. Online shopping really is the way to go, sad to say: they will arrive sometime over the next week, and I will then squee extremely loudly and try to resist the temptation to post semi-indecent photos on Live Journal simply so I can show them off. (And they really are /gorgeous/: fully fashioned, Cuban heel, lace at the tops. Hideously expensive, but utterly worth it.)