Shopping for a Swimsuit While Simultaneously Careening Toward Sixty

As a fat person, I’ve learned to take my lumps.

This year, I think I’ll take them to the beach.

The challenge of “careening toward sixty” is that my taste in swimwear has been evolving with my changing appearance.

I’m pretty sure I won’t give this a second thought when I’m 85 and have friends who look ten years younger in their swimsuits.  But now, I’m finding that unless one really does look young, a little more fabric is likely to be perceived as tasteful and elegant rather than dowdy.

This is not an opinion on the right of old people or fat people to flaunt it.  Both groups are now activists for full sexuality, canvases for wearable art, and trendsetters for beauty.  Finally!  But now that I’m getting on in years, it is my opinion that some of my shizz looks fubar and I can avoid the distraction of self-consciousness – and observation - by covering it.  Boom - there you have it.

Most women can tell you that the shopping experience is not a simple one; it is fraught with cultural hang-ups.  Here is one I have only now discovered:  while I search for appropriate swimsuits for the evolving me, I have to search terms that are religiously and politically tinged because many women who are contentedly represented by those terms have formed a significant market for swimsuits from special websites. “Plus” and “queen” were sufficient in the days when I only needed a larger size in styles I had always worn.  The formerly neutral “Modest” might add a flare that is useful if you are standing still, but not climbing out of a pool.  Today, I might have to reach beyond abstractions and vagaries and actually use a religious label to find the iron lung/Kevlar/chain mail/igloo swimsuit of my dreams.

My intercultural swimsuit shopping head trip is not necessarily negative, but can be disorienting.  It isn’t much different from the disorientation of an average-sized woman who has gained enough weight that she must buy from plus-size catalogs and refer to her image with a vocabulary she was once able to use with aloofness regarding others.  Being overweight and shopping at plus-size retailers is at odds with her identity, and she knows the world will judge her differently in her larger swimsuit.  Likewise, onlookers may make assumptions about my choice of beachwear, thinking it may be a symbol of participation in a lifestyle that is not part of my particular brand of otherness. 

But that’s okay.  I’ve put my misgivings aside and made my decision.

So, be sure to look for me at the beach in my sporty but modest togs because, at the end of the day, if my best bet actually turns out to be a swimsuit that comes with cultural perceptions, I will buy it and I will wear it.  If it is tasteful and elegant, you can count on me to be tasteful and elegant in it.  I will rock that swimsuit as much as I can and as much as I dare.  Some will surely wish they were me – maybe even you.  Who knows?  Maybe some cross-cultural shopping will bring more of us together and soften the blows for women of all stripes who have spent a lifetime being derided for choices that were nobody’s business to begin with.