Your friend is VERY lovely. Just thought I’d pass that on.
Well, I buy stretchy jeans too, as my waist is a lot smaller than my hips and I don’t need a giant gap of doom.
That said, tapered jeans look a whole lot more like jodhpurs than bootcut ones do. And if you’re an apple, there is no way that tapered jeans are going to look better on you. If anything, those sucks are going to make your ass, hips, and gut look even rounder. Think about it, you’re basically making your body shaped like an ice cream cone. < like that, but turned up. That’s saying “HEY LOOK AT MY BIG HIPS!”
Isn’t she purdy? I’m tremendously jealous of her coloring!
SQUEEEE! 
Now, there are particular charms in women with a certain amount of grab factor around the middle. My friend Lynn, for example, is 5’3" and about 150-160, raven curly hair, alabaster skin, and knows how to dress for her body. She doesn’t ever squeeze herself into anything teeny (although she’s not self conscious about low-ish rises and doing a lot of bending… ;)). Overall effect: loose, casual, sensual.
Then there was the waitress I had at lunch today. (As a customer, ok?) Similar build to Lynn’s, except taller. Had herself poured into too-low, too-tight black pants and a sweatshirt that just missed overlapping. Overall effect: newly pregnant. I had to look twice before I decided she wasn’t.
That is RandMcNally (our recently deployed Doper) and I’s favorite game to play- pregnant or fat? Oh, we also play the “Who should be wearing more clothes?” game.
In Vegas, the games quickly grow too tiring to play.
That wasn’t a typo, that’s actually the sound her poor, squished flesh made! 
Some of those empire-waisted camisoles make even skinny girls look pregnant. I’ll be thrilled if they’re still in style when I start having kids, though.
I wish I had big hips. No, seriously, I wish that I had something to balance out my belly. No hips, no butt whatsoever. (I hoped having a baby would give me a butt. Instead, it deflated, and now it looks concave.)
Tapered pants give me the same amount of room the whole way down. Boot cuts start me off with room to smuggle cantaloupes in the rear, followed by room for both legs in either one of the jean’s legs.
But of course, I am a child of the Eighties, and boot cuts have never looked right to me anyway.
I look like I’m wearing Mama’s clothes, except for the waistband, which my shirt thankfully covers.
I went to a friend’s bachelor party in Vegas a few months back. It was a relatively sedate thing, just gaming, eating and drinking, but we invented a game to play, particularly in the bars in the more upscale casinos: Hooker or Looker?
What’s really extra sad is when I see middle school students with the muffin top and fat rolls squishing out of their tank tops. I know they feel like they have to wear what’s fashionable, and it’s hard to find pants and tops that fit right under the best of circumstances. But where are their moms when they are squashing themselves into these jeans? And buying shirts that make their guts look huge? It’s not flattering and I feel bad for them, because they are just emulating what they see in magazines and on other girls, a lot of whom are still somewhat pre-pubescent and therefore are twigs.
I have to second the comments about the maternity-looking tops that are so popular now. At the mall the other day I thought, what a great time to be pregnant - you could shop in the regular clothes section!
But seriously, they make even the skinniest girls look pregnant. Not a good look…
I was telling someone the other day, it’s weird that on one hand, young girls are constantly bombarded with images showing super skinny girls and are being driven to eating disorders and the like. And then on the other, girls (and not just the fat ones) are showing off their bodies more, exposing too much skin, and exhibiting the “if you got it, flaunt it” aesthetic.
I like that chubby girls feel confident enough to get their “sexy on”, even if they’re doing it in a unflattering way. I’m not fat, but I wish I felt comfortable enough in my skin to be able to wear a belly shirt or low-rise jeans. Maybe this is a sign that fat girls are embracing their bodies, damn what anyone says? Maybe we should be kinda happy.
I see what you’re saying, but at the same time, I think it wouldn’t hurt *everyone * to cover up a little. It’s nice to be happy with your body, but that doesn’t mean that you should share your joy with the world in the form of visible flesh.
Form-fitting is sexy. A little cleavage is sexy. A little leg is sexy. A little midsection is sexy. All of these at once is overkill. And having parts of your body hanging out of your clothes because your clothes can’t contain them, despite the manufacturer’s best intentions, is the uberunsexy.
Hear, hear. Yes, skinny pants are good on skinny girls (although as jsgoddess noted, if your legs aren’t perfectly straight you will look appallingly knock-kneed in them).
But nobody’s butt looks good with the back pockets sitting under the curve of the butt and halfway down the thighs. No matter how beautifully and slenderly curved your figure, those cruel pants that slice you right across the asscrack make your butt look droopy and your back look like a side of beef. Especially combined with those belly shirts that slice you right across the lumbar region.
Twenty years from now, all those beautiful girls are going to look at old pictures of themselves in today’s clothes and go “AAAHHHHH! I look horrible! What was I thinking? Those were my prime years in terms of a lovely youthful figure and I wasted three or four of them in the most unflattering clothes possible!”
They can’t see it now, of course, because these clothes have been approved by the fashion industry as “in style”. But once they finally go out of style, suddenly everyone will notice how fugly they were.
On the bright side, has anybody noticed an encouraging recent trend among the young’uns to wear capri/clamdigger-type cropped pants with little round-toed flats that actually makes them look, you know, cute? Especially if the pants aren’t too low-ridey and/or have a long flowing tunic top over them. Now that’s a nice look on any girl with half-decent calves and ankles. It makes skinny girls look graceful and fat girls look pleasingly plump. Let’s see more of fashions that actually flatter, and enough with the catastrophically squeezy stuff that makes you look as though you’re trying to fight your way into your nine-year-old brother’s clothes.
Oh, and while we’re complaining, can I put in a little dollop of hatred for the current trend of Extremely Decollete Necklines Worn by Women in their Forties and Over?
Yes, a subtle hint of cleavage can be very nice, even on older women, and certainly older women should be able to show a little bit of skin even if it’s not as fresh and youthful-looking as it was twenty/thirty years ago (and I don’t care how many boob jobs or other surgical/spa treatments you’ve had, it ain’t gonna look as fresh and youthful as it did back then. Get over it).
But those hugely scooped or plunged necklines that literally show one-third or more of your breast surface just Do Not Work. They look pretty hookerish even on young and shapely women, actually. But on us older chicks, they look like a desperate attempt to substitute quantity for rapidly-decaying quality. “Yeah, the old gray mares ain’t quite what they used to be, but as compensation, I’ll show more of them!” Sorry. Does. Not. Work.
[Kayne Mode] GORGEOUS, sister, gorgeous! [/Kayne Mode] Seriously, I’d have loved to see one of the Project Runway designers come up with something that flattering for the Real Woman challenge.
Kimstu - I’d also like to register a complaint against low-cut shirts that give skinny girls scary xylophone sternum. I am a Scary McSternum myself, and I’m learning to let my shirts show no more than a hint of collarbone. Those low-cut tops only show off my total inability to force cleavage anyway.
Yeah!
I’m about 5’ 5" and under 200 pounds, but I have an interesting distribution of body fat that limits my clothing choices…the few dresses I own rely on creatively positioned sashes, ties, and elastic.
True…but that’s the case for any female. While a smaller female may not have the problems with flesh rolling over in too-small clothes, she will have problems with clothes digging into places they ought not go (for example, the “camel toe”). Too-small clothes are unpleasant on any size body.
Do clothing stores try to sell undersized (or the wrong sized) clothes to women? My mother was out shopping for jeans recently; the sales associate who was assisting her gave her a pair of jeans in the size under what she typically wears. Mom tried the jeans on and, as expected, they were cutting in horribly. The sales associate proceed to loudly gush about how great they looked, that they fit “perfectly,” and so forth…but they looked way too tight. (Mom didn’t buy the jeans, by the way.)
I saw the worse camel toe every last week. I wanted to drag the victim to a full-length mirror and draw a giant X on her reflection.
Lord, can I type one sentence without a damn typo? Please?
I think it depends on the sales associate, but I’ve had the same thing happen. I’m usually a 27 or a 28, but in skinnier jeans I can be a 29 or a 30 and I have no problem with that. However, lots of times the sales girl will try to convince me that I use us a shoe horn to put on size 27 Diesel jeans because that’s what I usually wear and they’re “supposed to fit tight”. Uh, right. But it would be good if my ass didn’t actually go numb mere moments after putting them on, ya know!
I agree with many of the sentiments here, but to be fair, husky men also have to abide by these rules. I hate muscle shirts even on physically fit men, let alone the one who let time take it’s toll.