I’ll start from the end of the story.
Here is a pic of the swimsuit I bought this year.
This is good news, right? That I found something that covers all the right bits?
*sigh*
Don’t get me wrong, I’m glad I have a new suit, lord knows I needed one, but I am feeling rather meh about it. I like it. I don’t love it.
I write about my quest to buy a bathing suit every year. I can’t help myself. It’s an issue every g.d. year.
I thought this year was going to be different. I can do 45 (45!) girly push-ups. I’m at the gym about five times a week, I run on the elliptical trainer, I lift I sweat I pull I work at my health. This was going to the The Year of Buff. Alas, I look more buff when I’m fully dressed.
My search started yesterday at the Bay, continued to Bikini Village, and then to Winners. It was at Winners that I had a small scale epiphany. I realized that I actually stood a chance at obtaining a swimsuit that didn’t cost me over $100. But nothing at Winners fit.
(As I was telling Mark this part of the story he interjected at this point, and suggested that he should have come along to help. I think he thinks I’m being too hard on myself, that I’m just imagining the fact that I couldn’t find a bathing suit that actually fit.
Ha.
Ha.
Ha.)
I continued my search today, but at a different Winners.
MEMO TO WINNERS:
Winners, I may have bought my bathing suit from you, and I appreciate the fact that it was marked down to $39.99, but boy, do you suck.
I chose seven bathing suits to bring into the fitting room. The fitting room lady told me I could only go into the change room with six items max. She offered to set one aside in the “hold” area for me.
“But I’m BATHING SUIT SHOPPING,” I said. I was desperate. “Can’t you just let me in with ONE extra? I’m going to have to put all my clothes back on just to come out and get this from you…”
“Oh,” she said. “Just put your coat on!”
Uh, yeah. I’m going to put a coat over an ill-fitting swimsuit, and walk back out into public just so I can get another ill-fitting swimsuit to try on.
She was holding the only one-piece, the one I eventually bought. I figured it was going to be the one I probably ended up with so I switched it out for a two-piece bikini. (YES, that’s exactly how deluded I was.) That was the one I left in the “hold” area.
So there I was, in the change-room, with one one-piece and five two-piece swimsuits. Most were the tankini-top variety. Shivering, pasty, traumatized, I went to take one off the hanger. WHAT THE HELL IS THIS, the two pieces of the bathing suit were connected – nay, STAPLED TOGETHER – by the security tags they put on the clothing to prohibit shoplifting, thereby rendering it impossible to try the TOP and BOTTOMS on at the SAME TIME.
I tried the second set. Same thing. And the third. Same thing. This was not a mistake.
I semi-tried on all of the swimsuits, dressed myself, and brought them back out and dumped them on the fitting room counter.
“Excuse me, but how do you expect people to try on two-piece bathing suits that are stapled together?” I asked.
“Oh,” she said. “I didn’t realize… ”
“…”
“… oh, we’re trying to keep them all together.”
I told her that didn’t make any sense. I grabbed the two-piece that I had been forbidden to bring into the change room and tried that one on. It was totally wrong for me. It was going to be the one-piece brown or nothing. So brown it was.
When I was at the cash I mentioned the fact the two-piece swimsuits were all stapled together.
“They do that because they want to keep all them together,” said the girl.
“I realize that, but how am I supposed to try them on?”
“You have to ask the fitting room attendant to remove the security device,” she said. “Then she’ll put it back on when you’re done.” (Being a fitting room attendant during bathing suit season must be the worst job in the world.)
“But it’s really inconvenient. I don’t want to have to ask anyone to take off the tags.”
“They do it because people swap tops from one bathing suit for the bottoms of another. I don’t know why people do that.”
I stared blankly.
LIKE DUH.
At this point I don’t blame Winners so much. I blame the WEINERS out there who take it upon themselves to swap tops and bottoms from two different sets. And I blame the swimsuit manufacturers for not giving normal women like me an opportunity to buy bathing suit separates. You know, like how the bra and underwear folks sell bras and underwear?
To you bathing suit designers I say this: you are living in a dreamworld in which women are a size six on top and a size six on the bottom, but I live in the real world, where the top size and the bottom size might not the same.
Where are the suits for people like me?
Mark suggested I get think about a custom suit. But I shouldn’t have to get a custom suit, you know what I mean?
