It's a Cover Up - Or I wish it was!

Your clothes should be tight enough to show you're a woman but loose enough to show you're a lady - Marilyn Monroe

 It’s been another week without enough sleep.  Maybe that’s what’s making me cranky.  Or maybe I’m just an old bag.  Or, most likely I think, I’m deeply jealous of my betters.  But do you know what’s really annoying me this week?  Yoga pants.  Or leggings, as we used to call them before sportswear got notions about itself.

Yes indeed, leggings have been promoted.  They are now being referred to as yoga pants, which I consider just poor vocabulary. Yoga pants are actually a much softer, looser item which to the best of my knowledge can only be carried off by people who are genuinely into yoga and have the kind of body that screams "supple and fit" from a great distance, and the relaxed walk of a true Yogi, which helps to make their pants look less like a nappy. 

These days people are basically wearing leggings with colouredy bits down the sides, or even, God help us, criss cross open sides, and calling them yoga pants. 

Not the same thing at all.

Now don't get me wrong.  I know they say you should never wear an item if you remember its being in fashion the first time around.  But I own a few pairs of leggings.  Plain black leggings, that I wear in the winter with very long jumpers or shirts.

For when leggings were considered the height of fashion the first time around, the end of the eighties, I think it was, they were almost always black.  And being children of the seventies and eighties, we all suffered such a lack of confidence that we would no more have gone around with our arses hanging out and only a thin layer of lycra protecting our modesty than we would have worn our knickers on our heads.

Leggings could only be worn with long tops, in those happy days.  It was a cast iron rule.  In fact, when I first met His Nibs a pair of leggings, an oversized music t-shirt, usually Nirvana, and a long flannel shirt, all worn with Doc Martens boots, was considered perfectly appropriate clothing for a girl going out on a date on a Saturday night.

A happier, simpler time.  It was before we were all supposed to have eighty different makeup products which had to be lashed on in a complicated series of stripes, and called contouring.  I was young, and looked young, and a bit of mascara and a lip gloss could get me a long way.  These days, even without the contouring caper, I have to put on pre-make up primers to look young, and extra layers of makeup to make my skin look brighter, and post makeup sprays and stuff to stop the whole lot from sliding into my wrinkles and sitting there.

I much preferred the simple grungey look of the early nineties.  It suited me very well, what with me being bone idle.  I was having my glory days at the time myself, if only I'd known it, but I was never one for glamorous clothes and showing skin.  Maybe if I'd known what an incredibly short moment I'd have in the land of the thin, I would have made a bigger effort to make the most of it.

Anyway, I think I could be on my own in hating this trend for going out clad only in lycra.  Two young colleagues of mine have informed me that they don’t agree with me at all, on any level.  That they quite like this trend.  Both these colleagues are male and in their twenties, but I’m sure that’s just a coincidence.

I may be a narky arse, but I’m fed up looking at people practically in their pelt.  What we're dealing with, with this new trend of people going around in their fancy leggings and crop tops, is basically nudity disguised as sportswear.  I'm walking the streets of Dublin lately with my eyes trained on the ground, for fear of what is to be seen. 

His Nibs and I once went on an adventure to the Wadi Rum Desert, in the Middle East.  His Nibs is the adventurer in our house, I'd be happy in a nice hotel with a bar near the pool.  But he has the soul of a wandering explorer and used to talk me into going on adventures that I never would have had otherwise, and that I've never regretted.  It was a great trip.  We had to cross the desert on camels, to reach the camp of the Bedouin people we were to stay with.  The Wadi Rum is an amazing desert, with red sand and huge rock formations everywhere.  I felt like I was on a movie set.  During the night we saw dozens of shooting stars, because we were so far from everywhere that there was no light pollution, and I've never seen a sky so velvety black.  The only sounds were the soft whisper of the sand moving, and the occasional snorts and grunts of the row of camels sleeping behind our makeshift tents, ready to carry us even further into the desert the following day. 

I see more camel toes during an average lunchtime on Henry Street, these days, than I did on that entire holiday.

All I'm saying is that the people who are parading around town in their sports clothes, especially if they're wearing a crop top or short top with leggings, need to be sure that they are happy for the rest of us to know what they look like naked.  Because we can all see exactly what you look like naked, believe me.

Now, of course some of my trouble here is good old-fashioned jealousy.  Because a lot of these women look amazing in their lycra.  I'd look like a hot dog squashed into the skin of a cocktail sausage in the same get up.  I wish I was one of these fabulous women.  That goes without saying.  I see them and I swear to give up fried food and chocolate and cake (and God do I love cake) and even milky coffees if it will get me into the sort of shape that these women have.  It won't of course.  The damage is done.  I think it's impossible for me to go back to the shape I had, in the original time of leggings, without major surgical intervention.  And so I sigh and roll my eyes and give out about the women who look the way I want to look.  But remember, even when I did look that way, and I did, you know, I was a size ten for a few minutes in 1995, I didn't go out wearing a second skin of spandex and nothing else.

Maybe I was just a kinder and more thoughtful thin person, and wouldn’t have enjoyed making women in their forties want to cry.  But even though you may have a stomach like a washboard, and a bottom you could bounce pennies off, please remember, when you jump on an escalator, and I waddle on behind you, I'm now eye to eye with your posterior.  If you've made the mistake of buying very cheap "yoga pants", there's a very good chance that I can see and could describe your underwear in disconcerting detail.  Or that I can see the individual stitches pulling across the centre of your bottom.  That's never dignified, and is one of the main reasons that we used to wear tops that practically reached our knees before getting into leggings.

Maybe we need a few rules.  Maybe if the outfit you’re going to wear to town is as revealing as your bikini, you should have to put on a sarong or similar before you leave the house.

Or maybe we should have rules about going out at all.  Maybe fat old moany people like me should be allowed into town one day, and the people who are addicted to Lycra could stay in, or actually do their exercise instead of just looking like they’re about to. 

The people who want to go out with their camel toe on display should be allowed out on other days.  Then we’d never have to meet and the people in my life wouldn’t have to listen to me ranting and raving all the time.

Or maybe, just possibly, you should try to retain some sort of mystery or dignity in your life and not put your privates on display on the streets.  You’re not a baboon.  But that's just one cranky woman's opinion.