Autistic Bottom-up thinking my way to body confidence: How research gave me style

Originally published on Medium

I like to research. “Bottom-up” thinking, the process of taking in a lot of information, processing it, and finding patterns is fun for me. And sometimes, I use those skills to solve a seemingly simple problem, like figuring out why I look weird in pictures.

The issue

Years ago, a friend took a photo of me standing in line at the Social Security office. When I saw it, I cringed at my curved posture, sharp elbows and shrunken hair out of proportion to the rest of my body. This shock at seeing myself in photos happened often. I accept my awkwardness; this shock was about something else. Why don’t candid shots match the mental image I have of myself?

And I don’t mean candid photos like “caught me off guard talking with my mouth wide open”. I mean photos when I really tried to look nice. After scrutinizing many of these photos over the years, I noticed a big part of the problem, besides my hair, was my clothes.

The problem with my clothes

Take a little black girl who matured too fast for girls’ clothing but was still too young for the women’s section. Make her grow up with skinny-is-in 90s/Noughties fashion. Throw in a body with top and bottom halves of different sizes. Sprinkle in skin with a warm undertone when pastel and cool colors are the popular choice for girls and a personal dislike for “girly style” as the cherry on top.

The result? Cute clothes became awkward on me.

What to do? I didn’t want to become a fashionista. But I also didn’t want to look terrible all the time. I wanted to be comfortable. I just wanted to look like me. Why was that so hard?

So I did what I do best: research. I went to the library and the internet to learn about body types, color theory, capsule wardrobes, petite style tips, bloggers, whatever I could find to try. But the advice never quite worked. Tips contradicted each other and what seemed to work for me was sometimes a Don’t. And why did some tips work one day but not the next?

I felt like a doll assembled from different factories. If only I could exchange the mismatched parts for ones that actually made sense together.

Even worse? The common advice didn’t fit my style. I did not want to wear layers and cardigans when the weather was 90+ degrees. I did not want to wear loud heels to look taller. I did not want to “suffer in the name of beauty”. To comfortably accommodate my body’s 2 different sizes, I tended to buy clothes a size too big. But then my clothes were always too large and baggy and that wasn’t my style either. And ugh, the sensory discomfort of ill-fitting clothes — pants that gap in the back and need belts that squeeze too tight to keep them up, shirts that won’t sit straight on the shoulders, fabric that’s too stiff or not structured enough or feels too plastic-y, etc, etc.

Learning to understand my body

A few years ago, my endless internet searches revealed the Kibbe system. For the first time, I discovered a body typing system that wasn’t obviously in love with the hourglass shape, with a goal to approach the body as it was and not to alter its silhouette.

Lightbulb moment. Was that why style advice never quite fit? Why I always felt like a random collection of body parts from my parents? This was the missing piece of the internal style map I’d been building. My body’s random collection of soft and hard lines wasn’t a bad thing. It just was. When my clothes followed my lines, they looked right on me. And when they didn’t look right, now I had the vocabulary and basic principles for what went wrong and how to fix it.

Another piece of the style puzzle? Contrast. I read about how my facial features and skin have a natural contrast that I could mirror in my outfits. Now I had what I needed to figure out an everyday uniform to wear to look put together with little brain power.

Learning to like my body

Learning to like my body required one more element: sewing.

Sewing is one of my life-long interests. As a kid, I used fabric scraps to handsew clothes for my dolls. Over the years, I picked up basic skills out of necessity, like hemming too-long pants shorter to fit. My most ambitious amateur project was adding width to a thrifted little black dress using Velcro, a strip of black fabric and sloppy interior handstitches.

During the pandemic, I took an online sewing course by Evelyn Wood who explained the WHYs behind sewing and, specifically, altering existing clothes to fit better. One common theme was how to troubleshoot problems with fit. The advice was not “alter the body to fit our clothing” like popular culture suggests. Instead, we alter the clothes to fit the body.

My body wasn’t the enemy. Clothes weren’t the enemy either once I learned to make them work with me and not against me.

And after all that work, now that I look in the mirror, I see myself. Not clothes. Just awkward me.

Which is all I ever wanted in the first place.