Stuff #24

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By J.J. Atwell

Hello Again

I’d like to write about something that cis women deal with all the time and most haven’t yet found the solution. And if cisgender women haven’t found the solution, is there any hope for crossdressers? Yes, there is lots of Stuff to cover today.

The Big Question

How do you find jeans that fit properly and show off your “girlish” figure. I guess that depends a bit on how you like your jeans to fit and what the current fashion trends are.

I personally like the skinny jean look. I know that’s going out of style, but I still like it.

Skinny jeans are very difficult to match to your figure because there can be so many variations in people’s bodies. Think first about cisgender women. How many of them have the same kind of curves around the hips, butt and down the line of the leg? Not to mention the actual length needed so they don’t wrinkle up at the foot. Even with those constraints, each manufacturer of jeans has different size standards. That forces a cisgender woman to try on jeans from different brands to find the one that fits her body best. And even then, they will find differences in fit between styles from the same manufacturer. For instance, one of my cisgender woman friends, Alicia, can wear a size 8 and a size 12 from same manufacturer, but in different styles of jeans.

There is also a thing often referred to as “Vanity Sizing” in the clothing industry. That’s when a manufacturer purposely makes the clothing larger but labels them in a smaller size. That way the buyer can say to herself, “Yay! I went down a size!!!” I recently did that myself having gone down to a size 8 skinny jean from a 10 or 12. Well, actually I’m going to stick with the I’m losing weight story and not the vanity sizing story.

But what about us?

Now let's talk about crossdressers. How do we find jeans that fit our body best? We do the same thing that cis women do, we try various brands and styles. But we have a complication: how to make our typical male body look more female in jeans. Many of us, JJ included, use hip/bum padding to fill out the seat of the jeans.

But some padding solutions leave an even worse problem… you can see where the padding ends on the leg (the dreaded “visible padding line”). So those typical oval foam pads that many of use to enhance our lower body work just fine when we are wearing a skirt. But when wearing skinny jeans or leggings, they can leave us looking like the snake that swallowed a ball! So it is important to get padding that tapers down the side of the leg to give the illusion of a smooth line.

Fortunately, most skinny jeans are made with material that has a fair amount of stretch. That helps the jeans hug the contours of the wearer without being too constraining when you move. In fact, some jeans are really comfortable.

I’m partial to the Gloria Vanderbilt line of jeans. I get their “comfort curvy” skinny jean because they do best on my augmented figure. After many different attempts to find the right fit, I now really understand women’s frustration with clothing sizes.

I’ll be back

Yes, there will be more Stuff. In the meantime comments are welcome either here on the blog or by email to Jenn6nov at-sign gmail dot com. JJ is always looking for more stuff, so if there is something you would like to read about please let me know!