No game. No shame. Just vibes.
Long before I bought my first sewing machine, I had been thinking about my plus-size self, not feeling amazingly great in my body, and panicking about what if… I have to go to an Indian wedding, and I wouldn't have anything to wear? My destination: a good relationship with clothes.
Most folks who are from a certain ethnic background can rely on their family to help them find the type of clothes they need for an event that requires a bit of cultural glamor; however, I am not this privileged. Because forget the queer self, the non-gender self, there's also the fat-self. And most important of all is the "I am a survivor" self.
It started with trying to find the biggest n*XL. No matter how high the value of n was, the item did not fit me. Yes, I looked for items in the AFAB and the AMAB categories, and nearly every time, there was almost always something wrong with the clothing item. I spent, NGL, hundreds of dollars during the early to mid-pandemonic days on this quest. I started to believe that the only thing I could do was alter.
I am one of those people that I need to talk it out until I'm blue in the face for something to actually happen. So I did. I talked to every plus-sized South Asian AFAB person I could find and asked them… where do you shop? What do you do? And the answers I found were, "I have a family member that sews," or … well, they were kinda wealthy and paid good money to get their clothing made.
There was another issue I hadn't addressed, the issue that was right there for everyone to see but never actually acknowledge. I'm nonbinary; though I might not say I am a total NB-Masc, I am not femme. Like, at all. Or haven't been since 2019. It wasn't just buying a salwar kameez, a tunic, or whatever the hell else… it was… how do I dress in my ethnic attire and not look like a full-figured woman (?!)
I do acknowledge, I reckon to some level, that if I were a skinny person, I could just go off wearing something oversized and hide the bits that I needed to hide or rather… bind them. (IYKYK) But if I was skinny, and passing, and all the other things… we wouldn't be here. I know that having brown-skinny privilege comes with its own problems, but I'm not here for that. There's a whole trauma section of social media that'll tell you all about it.
Fast forward to December 2022, and there I am — with my sewing machine ready to tackle the world! Or at least my closet. By this time, I had done plenty of YouTube research. I found some helpful places and tips on how to expand clothes, various ways to make alterations that didn't necessarily require a sewing machine, and, believe it or not, also someone who loves to tell you how to "explore unisex and androgynous fashion and style." Yet, there was a problem.
It was something I encountered very fast, very obviously, and no one was even remotely acknowledging it. There was no intersection of fat <> queer <> BIPOC <> non-femme.
Are you telling me that there are literally no plus-size-butch-queer-afabs that sew? Like ZERO ZERO on YouTube? LIKE ZERO???? Did they try to create a space for themselves, and it got hard, and they got so much hate and shame and rejection that they stopped?
I can't be… the one and only … or the first by any means. I mean… 🤔
☐ BIPOC
☐ PLUS SIZE
☐ QUEER/NONBINARY
☐ SEWIST
☐ GENDER-FLUID FASHION
OK, world. What you got for me?
So, as I've been diving into this sewing adventure since January 2023, I've been hoping to connect with anyone else out there navigating the same kind of stuff. If you're out there dealing with these wild intersections of identity and fashion, let's link up.
Because honestly, if there's one thing I've picked up, it's that sometimes we gotta create our own space. Here's to finding where we fit, altering what we need to, and making our own stories. Welcome (??) to this space where we're not just sewing clothes—we're stitching together a new vibe.
*In Combinatorics: 𝑛 often represents the total number of elements in a set or the size of a sample.
