Trying on Swimsuits Is Survival of the Fittest
This time of year, the mall is transformed into a house of pain.
It’s a wonder you can’t hear the screams and moans in the food court.
Women are buying bathing suits. All in all, it’s about as much fun as mucking out stables. The best of it, actually, is reading the stories that appear in the May or June issue of every women’s magazine on how to find the perfect suit for your figure.
This is, of course, a sick joke. All women, except those with the more upbeat forms of delusional schizophrenia, understand that there are figures for which the only flattering suit is the yet-to-be-invented one that utilizes the stealth technology that makes certain planes invisible.
The good news is that as long as you are reading a magazine you are not standing in a dressing room squeezed into a suit that makes you look like a Francis Bacon portrait of your mother.
Among the more comforting publications this time of year is the Land’s End catalog. Land’s End tags all the suits in its catalog with a symbol that helps you find the most appropriate one for your body type. If your waist happens to be larger than your hips or your bust, for example, you need only look for a circle next to the description of the suit in the catalog.
The Land’s End symbol system is as discreet and nonjudgmental as a good shrink. But even it has its limitations. The catalog has only five symbols, from a rectangle for women who have “balanced hip and shoulder, no defined waist” to an inverted triangle for women who have broad shoulders or a large bust.
But women’s bodies come in all shapes and sizes, as they all know, to their eternal chagrin. What about people whose bodies look like a six-pointed star or three pomelos on a spit? These people need suits too.
All this came to mind as I talked to shoppers at Sherman Oaks Fashion Square. I am always stunned by the courage of women: Not a single one fell to her knees and burst into tears.
Pam Senuti of Encino was in the Speedo store. She had gamely collected a number of suits to try on. The enviably slim Senuti and I begin to talk suits past.
“I once owned a white bathing suit,” I tell her, a confession that only women will understand.
“Do you have a picture?” she asks, obviously impressed. “I once owned the two-piece bathing suit on the cover of Teen magazine.”
Senuti, a 51-year-old neonatal nurse, has been told she has to start swimming in order to rehabilitate a bum shoulder. Few medicines could be harder to swallow than having to go out and buy a new bathing suit.
She admits she has avoided the ordeal for 15 or 20 years.
And she finds the magazines little or no help.
“‘What they never say is, if you’re over 50 and have big arms or a big butt or no bust, what are you going to wear?”
What indeed. A black suit would be too stark a contrast with her fair skin, Senuti decides (and besides most of them have all the style of an Amish prom dress). She is looking at dark green.
“The only really good thing,” she says, “is that my husband is old too, and, visually, he remembers me the way I was.”
To keep her image intact in his mind’s eye, she is planning to swim before the sun comes up.
She also has acquired a certain acceptance in the last couple of decades.
“I’m as good now as I am ever going to be,” she points out.
Nearby, at Macy’s Exposure (no woman named that beachwear department), Rebecca Browning is shopping with her mother, Toni Marie Janos.
Browning, 27, is a biology major at Valley College and a server at La Frite in Sherman Oaks. She hates to try on suits just like everybody else, despite the fact that she looks splendid in a Navy blue and white Nautica maillot.
It is a size 4, but she seems like a very nice person anyway.
One of the reasons she likes this suit is because it doesn’t have “a seam right up the butt,” she says.
“It’s a bitch,” her 51-year-old mother says of shopping for suits. A resident of Michigan, here to visit her daughter, Janos says she has her bathing suits custom-made. A sailor and world traveler, she likes islandy styles while her daughter prefers something simple but elegant.
We talk about the newest trend in bathing suits--something called a tankini, which is a tank top over a bikini bottom. Janos says her favorite recent trend in beachwear is the matching pareo, the sarong-like skirt that allows the swimmer to walk from point A to point B without feeling unduly exposed--this from a person who wears a size 6.
Not yet ready to actually try on suits, I promise to come back soon and shop. If nuns can find bathing suits, so can I. The tankini is unlikely, but a nice maillot is a possibility.
Will it be black?
Does Calista Flockhart need a malted?
