Pants that are becoming

I’ve started cutting my clothes again.

Staring at the full-length mirror, I deliberate over the fabric. Shouldn’t it hit right above my knee? I say to myself. If pants are going to have layers they need to be just right.

I turn around and the back of the pants doesn’t do my body justice.

But, i’m back here again buying clothes off the rack online that leave me dissatisfied. The same old narrative we rehearse in the mirror. Are these the right measurements? Shouldn’t the fabric fall on me the way it does in the photo?

But our bodies resist the logic of standardized sizing. They always have.

What I’m buying is not just a garment, but an image of one a translation of fit, mediated through a model whose proportions, posture, and styling have already done the work. So I click purchase.

Fully knowing the photoshop, on-set alterations by a stylist, and the photographer’s direction have allured this purchase.

There’s a quiet dissonance in the realization that what arrives is not what was seen, and that the gap between the two is not accidental. It’s structural.

For a long time, I internalized that gap. Assumed the failure was mine. That my body was the variable that needed adjusting. But it never was about it looking the same as the image. We are being sold something unfinished. Not in construction, but in intention. It asks to be completed by a body it was never truly designed for.

So I alter it.

Not to correct a flaw, but to make it take what was taken from me. To shift the garment out of its standardized form and into something more specific, more lived-in, more mine.

Personal style, then, is not simply a matter of taste. It’s an intervention. A refusal to accept the ready-made as resolved.

[edited for clarity on May 1,2026 2:30pm]