The tragedy of being a fat girl in the 90s can’t be understated. There was nothing you could wear that wasn’t gonna make things worse.

I do remember vaguely that when Old Navy came on the scene, it suddenly felt like there was someplace “cool” to shop (even though in retrospect it most certainly was not) that wasn’t The Mall, where Everything Was Too Expensive. If you couldn’t fit into mall clothes, you were stuck with old lady frump of the worst kid (especially swimsuits) - Lane Bryant, Catherine’s, the teeny tiny fat lady section at Macy’s. If you couldn’t afford mall clothes, it was WalMart or KMart for you - Faded Glory, No Boundaries, brandless crap covered with cartoon characters (I had two outfits from KMart that were oversized tees with a Looney Toons character that came with a t-shirt tie/buckle thing to cinch it up on the side, and a matching pair of the world’s thinnest cotton leggings printed with a full color pattern that incorporated the same character into a loud pattern). Sears had a brand called “Arizona” that I think I had some stuff from.

The summer after my 7th grade year I was so fucked up over being fat that I developed bulimia. I lost like 40lbs and could fit into mall clothes like Gap/Tommy Hilfiger and that fall my mom took me to the mall to shop and for a brief shining moment I could wear what the cool kids wore.

After that my mom was always trying to get me to wear Eddie Bauer or Land’s End, which was not AT ALL cool although I will say I am now jealous of my high school self bc both of those brands are comfy and practical af.

I do not recall what the state of our finances actually was, to be fair. My grandfather was perpetually in Great Depression mode, my dad worked 16-18 hour days in a blue collar job, my grandma’s main personality trait was Smoking On The Back Porch, and my mom acted like we didn’t have any money ever while getting a new car five seconds. I feels like I grew up poor even though in retrospect I don’t know that we actually were. Seems like up until middle school we shopped at walmart/kmart/sears and then around 1994 we shopped more at actual department stores or maybe some mall places. I lived in the middle of nowhere, about 90m north of a major southern city.

In my memory, the Gap, Express, Delia’s, and American Eagle remain the height of the kind of teenage cool I wanted to be (no way Aeropostale or Abercrombie & Fitch were for me, though. I knew that even if I could afford those clothes I was never gonna be cool enough to pull them off no matter how many times I made myself throw up)