My wife wore “jeggings” with a long shirt just the other day. Yes I hate the word but she looked hot to me.
Is it okay to wear them under a dress? I have a fabulous dress that is a skosh too short for my tastes and I’d love to wear it with a pair of thick, black leggings (no transparency!) to modestly cover my legs but I would hate to be breaking a fashion rule. If I can’t what should I wear to keep from being dressed inappropriately?
pbbth, that is more than okay. Tights & Leggings - IMO, of course - were always meant as an added measure of modesty. What is NOT okay is when someone wears them alone as pants.
I always feel so skeevy even glancing at someone when they’re LAP-ing.
Oh, boy. I googled Leggings as Pants. Nope, this is not a good thing (unless you’re someone who enjoys women walking around with no mystery below the waist). Hey, ladies, want your cellulite and sagging butt really emphasized? Leggings as pants is the way to go!
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Good to know! Also, after viewing the link below I must say that my question pretty much answered itself. :eek:
Since I live in a university town, with thousands upon thousands of shapely, 20-something hotties all over the streets, I’m going to dissent from the majority view and heartily endorse the wearing of LAPs, specifically in that demographic.
I am an old roué.
Penningtons, the Canadian version of Lane Bryant, has leggings and jeggings in their MXM line. See link.
I just kind of wandered around in disgust. Listen, guys, I’m like size 22-24. Leggings? Seriously? On my fat ass? Please, I may be fat, but I still have some self-respect.
MXM picks up on every single young person fashion trend. A few years ago it was knee-length shirts. Oh great, I’m one step closer to a muumuu.
Ooooh, then there was the year of empire waistlines. This is a pregnant woman wearing an empire waistline. I carry most of my weight around my stomach. When the store manager trying to meet a quota tells you not to buy a shirt because it makes you look pregnant, you know you look bad in it.
And, finally, I have yet to see a vertically lined shirt there. Horizontal stripes. So many horizontal stripes…why?
kushiel, I’m a size 8-10, and I have no business being in LAPs. I don’t think anyone does. I think confused people go into H&M or Target or Lane Bryant or Macy’s or wherever and buy the new stuff they’ve never seen before, or the stuff they see other people wearing. Herd mentality.
Which includes off the shoulder shirts, LAPs, pregnant-lady shirts (WTF is THIS all about!?) etc. I will not regret what I wore in middle school or high school or college, but so many people will…
I think heroin thin people like Lindsay Lohan, Paris Hilton and the cast of Gossip Girl can pull off leggings, but we mere mortals? No way. And it is a must to wear a top that covers most of your thighs.
I’m going to be buying and wearing a few leggings this winter. Not as pants, though, but more like footless tights under skirts or dresses, for warmth. My dresses and skirts hit me anywhere from mid-calf to lower, and they’re all of lightweight cotton…and I already have several shawls/pashminas for my top. I might wear the leggings by themselves in the privacy of my own home, also for warmth.
Cloth is woven in such a way that horizontal stripes are more common, that is, the stripes run perpendicular to the selvage, and the way many garments are cut out, there’s less waste if they’re cut out so that the stripes are horizontal. If the fabric is knitted, then the stripes might be a result of the yarn color changing from one row to the next, and knitted fabric is stretchier in one direction than the other. Besides which, fashion designers generally design for fashion models, and they demand that those models be very tall and very thin. Sizing up the designs is usually an afterthought, a concession that larger people do have money to spend on clothes. Very few people design exclusively for larger people, and those who do generally design for ONE body type, and for women, that’s usually a broad shouldered big busted woman with a proportionally small waist, which is a tiny minority of larger women, who usually carry their weight mostly in the belly, butt, or thighs, or a combination of those three locations.
Oh, leggings like that are fine. If you’re using them as substitutes for nylons or tights, that’s one thing, but using them as a replacement for pants is another. If you wouldn’t show it in stockings, you shouldn’t show it in leggings! 
I was just wishing that plus-sized stores would realize their clientele might look more flattering in a different style that can still be similar to runway fashion but tweaked slightly.
I’m so happy that this last year they’ve started explicitly labeling types of fits on their pants and offering more variety. I need a skinny leg pant, I’ve got a huge waistline but smaller thighs. Until the skinny leg pants started coming out, I’d have to pick the pair that looked the least like hammer pants.
The stores, or the clerks in the stores, do realize this. It’s the designers and the buyers who don’t seem to realize that people come in a variety of shapes as well as sizes. I used to work in a store that sold women’s plus sized clothes, and the buyer was a woman who was plus sized herself…but she was about a size 18 (our mannequins wore that size) and she was indeed shaped like a plus sized mannequin, in that she had a rather large bust, a comparatively slender waist, and hips that were not overly large. And she was tall, at least 5’10". She asked me if I bought any of the new Club de France line, and I said no, it wasn’t flattering on me, and she said that it should look great on me. So, after work one night, I challenged her to find ANYTHING in that line that would look good on me. This particular line had tops, skirts, pants, and dresses. It happens that I do have a waistline, but it’s not as (proportionately) small as hers was. And, at just a whisper above five feet, all the design features hit me at the wrong spots…that is, the waist on a dress would hit me at around my hips, I’d have to have more than half a foot cut off of the legs of the pants, which would throw off the proportion, and the waist of the pants would come up to just under my boobs, so that I couldn’t wear any tops that had to be tucked in. We did find ONE top that looked halfway decent on me. As I told her, though, it wasn’t professional enough for me to wear while I worked (and she agreed, she didn’t want me to wear that top at work), but I certainly didn’t want to pay $75 after my discount for a top for casual wear. After this little session, she stopped buying as much stuff from that particular designer, even though she loved his designs and they looked good on HER.
Many buyers get into a rut of buying particular styles, and not considering the fact that what looks good to them and on them might not look good or be appropriate for other people. I told that buyer that NOBODY was buying those Tshirts, even though they were very affordable and were cute on a hanger, because the stripes went horizontally. She said “But they’re so cheap!” and I said nobody wants to look fatter, no matter how cheap the garment is. She said that she couldn’t find Tshirts with vertical stripes, and I said then get them without stripes, or do without them…because it made no sense to buy things, no matter what the price, if we couldn’t sell them.
I don’t know why manufacturers won’t make more flattering designs.
This is the thing - they have their in-house designers (Penningtons). There really are very few places in Canada to go buy plus-sized clothing that isn’t produced by Penningtons. They have slowly started to bring in clothes from other designers, but those are in the locations in the larger cities. They are the Walmart of plus-sized clothing in that they are the only option in smaller cities but with the difference that they only carry the clothes they make. that’s why I said I was happy they were getting more diverse in the cuts of their jeans and other pants.
I don’t trust people who claim that black is slimming. Black might be slimming…but it’s also very unflattering to a lot of people. I’ve seen too many people who think that by wearing black, they’ll look slim and attractive. I usually wear dark but clear colors, such as cobalt blue and intense purple and even fuschia. Anything which has yellow in it usually looks bad on me, and also anything that is muted, or anything that’s black. I can wear black accents, but if the cloth around my face is primarily black, I will be mistaken for the guest of honor at a funeral.
Also, after a certain point, there is no such thing as a “slimming” outfit. There are outfits which are more or less attractive on a particular person, but there is absolutely NO outfit in the world which is going to make me look as slim and attractive as I was when I was in my teens and early twenties. I don’t care how the garment is cut, or if the stripes are horizontal, vertical, or diagonal, I’m still going to look overweight. Because I am. And people who go into clothing stores and insist that the clerk help them find “something slimming” are not fooling anyone. We can help a person find the most flattering outfit, or at least the least unflattering. But if that person weighs 400 pounds, then there’s only so much that an outfit can do, in terms of slenderizing effects.
I hate clothes shopping. I have no butt at all, my legs are long, most of my fat accumulates on my stomach, and I am a DD. So if it fits in one spot, somewhere else is either too loose or too tight. And even if I didn’t have an extreme hatred for leggings of all types, I could never ever wear them without looking ridiculously top heavy. I’ll stick with my flared leg jeans and normal people shirts, thankyouverymuch. I’ve never cared too much about fashion. As long as it’s comfortable, and doesn’t make me look bad, I’m happy.
So in the spirit of this thread, I’d like to start a charity. Mirrors for the needy. Every time I see someone wearing something awful, I think, “They must not have a mirror at home to see how bad they look. And now they’re out in public. Tragic.”
I don’t know how many times I’ve seen a perfectly normal-bodied woman looking terrible in clothes that are completely wrong for them - I don’t think the issue is mirrors, I think the issue is wearing whatever’s stylish, regardless of how you look in it. My personal, ongoing peeve is the “bumroll” jeans that are persisting - the ones that make every woman who wears them look like she has a roll for a bum. Here’s a good example of the type of jeans that are so unflattering on everyone.
That roll is a muffin top. See also, song from 30 Rock with the lyrics “my muffin top is all that / whole grain low fat / I know you wanna piece of that”. And it means you need to buy higher rise jeans. My JCrew “hipslung” jeans are their highest rise, and they are still 3/4" below my belly button. Sadly, the norm are ultra low rise, which are not flattering to anyone over a size 2.
Lynn you’re so right. Today at the post office I saw a lady with near translucent skin decked out in all black. She looked like a vampire, even if that’s not what she was going for.