My friends Lisa and Chevorne have a term for people with short legs: Ducks. This is because, with their stumpy little appendages, their bums appear to dangle just centimeters above the ground, at sharp odds with torsos that are the same length as everyone else's, in much the same manner as - you guessed it - a waddling duck.
I, sadly, am very definitely a duck. Don't get me wrong, there are undeniable advantages to this body type. I don't get uncomfortable on plane trips or during movies, and people travelling long distances with me in a car like me because they don't have to move their seats forward when I sit in the back.
But there are drawbacks, too. It's a matter of bad jeans.
Now, you find me a girl who enjoys shopping for jeans and I'll show you a girl who has never let a Ferrero Rocher pass her lips; a girl with such high self esteem that Maslow built his entire theory of self-actualisation around her. For the rest of us, however, jeans shopping is an exercise in self-flagellation. Worse, actually, as I would rather shave my shins with a cheese grater that had been dipped in salt, than stare at my cellulitey ass trying to shimmy into a pair of denims that, inevitably, will get stuck half mast around my giganti-hips. If I am to tackle the challenge of finding a pair that look good, it must be on a day when I am feeling invincible; when I have had only one brownie in the week; when my hair is straight and shiny rather than pulled into the half pony I favour when in a rush (a look that should be labelled the anti-Botox as it instantly makes me look like a middle aged tuckshop mom called Beryl) and when I have, if not polished my toenails (because, with my lack of interest in grooming, that's an unlikely event), at least cut them.
Such days do not come about often.
My reluctance to invest time in finding the perfect pair has resulted in some horrible mistakes. It would appear that people with my hip size have much longer legs, as most of my jeans have ended well below my cankles, leaving me with three options: I can a) roll them four times, so that I have donutty bunches at the bottom of my pants, making it impossible to take neat steps with my feet in line with each other - instead, I have adopt a slightly more wide-legged gait; b) wear them long, so that I look like an old-fashioned Chinese mandarin with a mysterious and surprising penchant for hiding things in my pant legs or c) throw away my flats and wear high heels forever, embracing a circa-1990s, I-like-to-look-vaguely-corporate-even-on-weekends look.
I thought that my hunt for the perfect pair had come to an end on honeymoon. If you think about it, this was an auspicious time: I had just ceased to be a single girl, plucked from the desert of loneliness by my man. So, too, had I been rescued from the morass of bad denim by my chance visit to Diesel at the Tel Aviv airport. The jeans were a revelation: softest blue denim, a great length, snug around the waist, creating that elusive combination: comfort and good looks.
I would be able to wear them for another three months before I fell pregnant.
What happened after was nasty. I have nothing nice to say about the jeans I wore while pregnant; suffice to say that by the end of my 30 kilogram ordeal, the fuzzy black wasitband (jeans with a fold down waist - the horror!) had been washed so many times it had grown a fungus of bolletjies. Emerging from these beauts was a great occasion. But quickly it soured - their replacement was a pair of skinnies with a crotch that had a nasty habit of hanging around my knees, and pulling my knickers down with it. I felt utterly compromised when wearing them.
Thus, you can imagine my delight when I discovered, today, that I can fit into my dream Diesels once more. I would of course be more delighted if the frayed bits that were apparently included in the denim weave to give an artful shabby chic look hadn't given up the ghost - they've gone from frayed to falling apart, I can only imagine because the strain of trying to hold my thighs in was to much for cotton threads without the benefit of reinforcements. If these jeans were a person, they would be the puny IT guy who had entered a gym for the first time and was trying to benchpress 200kg.
They're going to take the pain, though. There's no way I'm going shopping for a new pair.
I, sadly, am very definitely a duck. Don't get me wrong, there are undeniable advantages to this body type. I don't get uncomfortable on plane trips or during movies, and people travelling long distances with me in a car like me because they don't have to move their seats forward when I sit in the back.
But there are drawbacks, too. It's a matter of bad jeans.
Now, you find me a girl who enjoys shopping for jeans and I'll show you a girl who has never let a Ferrero Rocher pass her lips; a girl with such high self esteem that Maslow built his entire theory of self-actualisation around her. For the rest of us, however, jeans shopping is an exercise in self-flagellation. Worse, actually, as I would rather shave my shins with a cheese grater that had been dipped in salt, than stare at my cellulitey ass trying to shimmy into a pair of denims that, inevitably, will get stuck half mast around my giganti-hips. If I am to tackle the challenge of finding a pair that look good, it must be on a day when I am feeling invincible; when I have had only one brownie in the week; when my hair is straight and shiny rather than pulled into the half pony I favour when in a rush (a look that should be labelled the anti-Botox as it instantly makes me look like a middle aged tuckshop mom called Beryl) and when I have, if not polished my toenails (because, with my lack of interest in grooming, that's an unlikely event), at least cut them.
Such days do not come about often.
My reluctance to invest time in finding the perfect pair has resulted in some horrible mistakes. It would appear that people with my hip size have much longer legs, as most of my jeans have ended well below my cankles, leaving me with three options: I can a) roll them four times, so that I have donutty bunches at the bottom of my pants, making it impossible to take neat steps with my feet in line with each other - instead, I have adopt a slightly more wide-legged gait; b) wear them long, so that I look like an old-fashioned Chinese mandarin with a mysterious and surprising penchant for hiding things in my pant legs or c) throw away my flats and wear high heels forever, embracing a circa-1990s, I-like-to-look-vaguely-corporate-even-on-weekends look.
I thought that my hunt for the perfect pair had come to an end on honeymoon. If you think about it, this was an auspicious time: I had just ceased to be a single girl, plucked from the desert of loneliness by my man. So, too, had I been rescued from the morass of bad denim by my chance visit to Diesel at the Tel Aviv airport. The jeans were a revelation: softest blue denim, a great length, snug around the waist, creating that elusive combination: comfort and good looks.
I would be able to wear them for another three months before I fell pregnant.
What happened after was nasty. I have nothing nice to say about the jeans I wore while pregnant; suffice to say that by the end of my 30 kilogram ordeal, the fuzzy black wasitband (jeans with a fold down waist - the horror!) had been washed so many times it had grown a fungus of bolletjies. Emerging from these beauts was a great occasion. But quickly it soured - their replacement was a pair of skinnies with a crotch that had a nasty habit of hanging around my knees, and pulling my knickers down with it. I felt utterly compromised when wearing them.
Thus, you can imagine my delight when I discovered, today, that I can fit into my dream Diesels once more. I would of course be more delighted if the frayed bits that were apparently included in the denim weave to give an artful shabby chic look hadn't given up the ghost - they've gone from frayed to falling apart, I can only imagine because the strain of trying to hold my thighs in was to much for cotton threads without the benefit of reinforcements. If these jeans were a person, they would be the puny IT guy who had entered a gym for the first time and was trying to benchpress 200kg.
They're going to take the pain, though. There's no way I'm going shopping for a new pair.
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