Body Confidence In Costume

I have been cleaning out my closets recently (both figuratively and literally).  Working through the food issues has not been easy and I only feel like I have just started.  I feel similarly about my actual closets.

My brother and I have been living together since 2006 and we moved into this house in 2011.  Since then, we have both gotten married, adopted several pets, and acquired a lot of stuff.  My sister-in-law is about to add another chicken nugget to the family (or baby nugget lol).  A household with 4 adults, 4 cats, 2 dogs, and 1 baby is just not in the cards for the Joyce clan.

Alas, it is time to move out.  I have been diligently trudging through the absolute nightmare condition of my sewing room.  I haven't had much time for sewing projects since I have been working on the house for the last two years.  Prior to that, I did a booth at the Cooper-Young Festival that essentially took all of the creative out of me.  I made a lot of cute shit that a lot of people really loved, and very few actually purchased.  I guess everyone gets a good, strong failure every now and then.

I don't really want most of the stuff anymore, and I want to downsize a lot before my husband and I find our little nook to move into.  Fortunately, my sister is all about some free art/crafty supplies.  I feel less guilty about getting rid of stuff if it will go to someone who will actually use it, and she is super stoked about free shit.

In any case, it came to the question of my costume closet.  She said in no uncertain terms that she would never wear any of those, and that I had some big ole balls to wear all of it so confidently like I did.  Maybe that is something that comes after you hit 30.

At the time I started making costumes for myself, it was out of necessity.  They didn't actually make cool costumes in plus sizes in the early 2000's.  And I didn't just need cool costumes, I needed fabulous ones.  The period of my life where I spent a lot of time with my gay guy friends was in full swing.  Since I can sew, I made my own.

I think this was one of the first costumes I made for myself.  There were other ones before this that I just kind of put together, but this is the first one that I put a lot of time or effort into. 

Halloween 2004 - Beer Wench

It started kind of a thing that we did at the time (my best friend and I).  We didn't really need a reason to dress up.  Most of the time if we were going to Backstreet, we were wearing "theme night" clothes just because it was fun.  I am sure it was also a way for me to stand out, yet hide myself behind a facade at the same time.  Since I was at a gay bar, it wasn't like some dude was going to hit on me anyways.

Around the same time, I had started doing Nutri-System and working out more.  The changes in my body brought more confidence and the costumes followed suit.

May 2005 - Moulin Rouge

June 2005 - store bought Playboy Bunny

By halloween of 2005, I had lost 80 pounds and was experiencing some full-on self-confidence for the first time in my life.  That first halloween after I lost weight and had been working out and building muscle, we went as sexy leprechauns.  I made both of our costumes.  

I will say this: I searched high and low for a sexy leprechaun costume I could just buy.  Since I had lost weight, I figured I should be able to find something.  When I say there was nothing available like this at the time, I am serious.  There were several years in a row where I would decide to be something, hand make my own costume, then all of a sudden two years later that costume was on the market.  I probably should have been a costume designer.

Halloween 2005 - Sexy Leprechaun

Looking at this photo now, I have to agree with my sister about my big ole balls for wearing it.  But I felt good about myself and about my body and I didn't care who saw that.  The next several years went through many iterations of costumes for a variety of events (Mardi Gras, Southern Decadence, Halloween, New Year's, etc). 

The fact that I made these myself only added to my street cred at the time among my friends.  They didn't care if I was still fat or not.  I had some mad skills with my sewing machine, and the more outrageous the getup the better.

But, it was a double-edged sword.  I got a lot of attention for what I was wearing.  When I was in the company of my gay friends (or really any time I was in New Orleans), it was overtly positive.  But outside of that, I got a lot of flack/scorn/ridicule for wearing these among straight people specifically.  

Don't get me wrong, my *friends* loved them (gay or straight).  But strangers are not kind to fat people no matter how many hours they spent sewing a custom-made costume.  It was almost this attitude of "there's a reason they don't make that in YOUR size" or perhaps "fat people don't deserve to feel sexy".

I will say this, the more I made these and wore them, the less I cared what anyone thought about my body.  I put myself out there in a pretty vulnerable way, but I really enjoyed making these and showing them off.  I noted the photos if they were store bought costumes.  The rest, I either hand sewed all of it, or I started with a base (like a corset) and made the rest from there.

Halloween 2007 - store bought Sailor Girl

Mardi Gras 2008 - Mardi Gras Float
Note: I actually had the flu

Halloween 2008 - Queen of Hearts (the rabbit and hatter are strangers lol)

Mardi Gras 2009 - store bought Flasher

Mardi Gras 2009 - with the NOLA PD

Mardi Gras 2009 - Mardi Gras Bead Dress

Halloween 2009 - Blind Melon Bee Girl

Mardi Gras 2010 - Moulin Rouge (again)

Mardi Gras 2010 - Candy Snatch

Halloween 2010 - store bought Masquerade

Halloween 2010 - store bought Flapper

Halloween 2010 - Schizophrenic Ballerina

Mardi Gras 2011 - store bought Devil

Mardi Gras 2011 - I literally went as a Drag Queen
Someone literally asked me if I was a real girl.

Halloween 2011 - Ursula the Sea Witch

Southern Decadence 2012 - Trailer Trash

Southern Decadence 2012 - you really needed both photos for the full effect

Halloween 2014 - store bought Flo and Mayhem

Halloween 2015 - store bought Day of the Dead

Christmas 2015 - store bought Mrs. Claus
My sister asked us to wear something nice for a Christmas card.

Halloween 2016 - Bee Girl (again) and Devo Guy

The past few years since my husband and I got married, I haven't really put a huge amount of time into hand sewing anything.  The Cooper-Young thing really drained my creative energy for a long time, and the house drained the actual energy.  I don't think we are actually going to do anything this year because my surgery is on November 1st and we have a lot to do before then (and no costumes at this moment).

I hope that once life is a little more settled down, this is something I can go back to doing for both of us, because I did truly enjoy it.  Though I always fit in in New Orleans, it is hard to find an appropriate place to wear something so elaborate in Memphis.  There definitely is a lack of appreciation for things like this here.

I don't really get the apathy probably because Halloween is my favorite holiday of the year.  I always kind of cock my head to the side with a very confused look when adults say they don't dress up for halloween or that it's something for kids.  Why?  It is the one day of the year when you can be anything you want.  

If anything, I have always felt like I am stuffed into this very plain shell for all of the other days of the year.  Halloween is probably the day I get to dress the way I would prefer to every day.  It would be kind of hard to show up at my bank job dressed as a saloon girl.  I mean women in this industry hardly get any respect anyhow.

Looking back over these, I see two things.  I see the evolution of my costumes in a variety of places and events with different friends.  It brings up memories of trips taken and a lot of fun times.  I think you can see in my face in each photo that I am enjoying myself.  Secondly, I see the evolution of my body.  Although I started in my sexy leprechaun costume at one of my lowest adult weights, I gained all of it back over the period of time these photos were taken.

I see the confidence in my costuming soaring in the forefront, but the confidence in my body declining in the background.  I definitely gained a "I don't really give a fuck what you think of me or my body" attitude over the course of these 10+ years.  And at my core, I think I wanted to wear each of these and force my sexuality onto people whether they wanted to see me that way or not; whether they thought a fat girl should express herself like that or not.

I don't know that I will ever wear these again.  Some of them are too big now anyhow.  I haven't really figured out what to do with them at this point.  Mostly because I honestly don't think most fat girls have the balls to wear them like I do.  Perhaps, there is a drag queen costume charity that needs some bling.

These are definitely some of those things that are hardest to get rid of when you are trying to simplify your life.  So much time and effort went into each one of them from designing to actually creating them.  It's not something I can just throw away mostly because there are still pieces of me woven in.