Who has a perfect body anyway?

So. Today I had one of those demoralising kind of shopping for clothes trips. This led me to wonder, is it just me who has an unusually shaped body?

credit to www.bellanaija.com

I'll admit I'm not the slimmest girl in the world (ahem) and that I do not have a perfectly symmetrical body. I can reveal that I am (rather unhelpfully) somewhere around a size 10 on top and a size 14 down below. Maybe too much personal information to be sharing but actually I don't consider that to be bad after giving birth to two gorgeous girls (yes, I'm biased about the girls).

I've probably always had this kind of body shape. The hips have always been just there (child-bearing, my mother told me, to be sure she was right), I have very long legs but an extremely short body, and as a youngster I was particularly flat-chested and late to develop, which did not, of course, particularly endear me to any boys. Being painfully shy may also have had something to do with that though.

Anyhow, I digress. I've now reached the ripe old age of 40 and am no longer flat chested. I do still have narrow shoulders however, which obviously isn't helping. Dresses that fit me are pretty impossible to find.

Today I had a Eureka! moment and decided that it's not a personal shopper that I need to help me find clothes; I need a personal seamstress to come with me and alter the ones I do like. 

I started off in one of my favourite high street shops after receiving one of their product catalogues in the post. Everything in the catalogue looked wintry and appealing, in my kind of colours and fabrics. I literally cannot remember the last time I went shopping for me, so I grabbed a half hour in town and made a beeline for this shop (after picking up Halloween decorations for the girls, of course).

I loaded myself up with ten tops - well nine to be fair, plus one jumper dress - and would have also taken some jeans into the changing room if they'd have had them in my size. I wasn't going to name the shop, as I'm definitely not slagging them off per se - to be honest, I've endured this experience more than once in my life, in various outlets - but then I thought I'd copy @FatFace in just in case this post goes viral and they want to thank me by providing some made to measure clothes.

Friendly and helpful staff, lovely changing rooms, a large mirror (all the better to admire those lumps and bumps in) and plenty of space plus a bonus seat to rest a handbag on/sit down on inbetween changes (??!!). TEN tops I tried on, as you can see here:

They are 'everyday' kind of tops, nothing out of the ordinary, but lovely nonetheless. I would have been happy with any one of them. If all ten had fitted, I possibly would have bought the lot.

They were all a size 10. They all fitted me badly in a similar, yet different way. Too low cut, too gaping, too billowy, too falling off the shoulders, too tight under the bust but too big on the bust, etc etc. I was sad. I was also slightly annoyed with myself for wasting my time.

I gave up on tops and went to another shop, where I picked up 3 pairs of jeans in a size 14. One pair too tight, could hardly get them zipped up, one pair a good fit but magically very unflattering, and the third pair very comfy but with the big gaping hole at the back (big hips, small waist). Three pairs, from the same shop, in supposedly the same size. 

At a final shop I grabbed seven tops to be tried on back at home because my (limited) time was running out. I'll be keeping two of those. Yay, success at last, ahem, cough cough.

As I mused over my disappointment back at home, this happened:

Don't judge me, maybe I was just trying to make my top half bigger and balance myself out...

So what do you think? Do you have the perfect body? Can you pick up clothes anywhere? Do you know a good seamstress??!

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