I spent most of my twenties buying clothes that looked great on the hanger and terrible on me. Wrap dresses that gaped. High-waisted jeans that somehow still didn’t sit right. Blazers that pulled across the back. Every shopping trip ended the same way: I’d blame my body for not cooperating with the clothes, instead of blaming the clothes for not cooperating with my body.
It took an embarrassingly long time to figure out that the problem wasn’t me. It was the approach.
The fitting room lie
There’s a particular kind of defeat that happens in department store fitting rooms. The lighting is bad. The mirror is worse. And you’re standing there in something that looked perfect on the model, wondering what went wrong between the rack and your reflection.
I think most women know this feeling. A 2023 survey by the Journal of Fashion Marketing found that 67% of women leave fitting rooms feeling worse about their bodies than when they walked in. That number didn’t surprise me at all. What surprised me was how long I let it keep happening.
The turning point, if I’m being honest, wasn’t some empowering revelation. It was laziness. I got tired of returns. Tired of the cycle of buying, trying, hating, shipping back. I started asking a different question: instead of “how do I make my body fit this outfit,” what if I figured out what actually works with the shape I already have?
What “dressing for your body” actually means now
The old version of this advice was rigid and kind of insulting. Apple-shaped? Hide your midsection. Pear-shaped? Distract from your hips. As if certain body parts were problems to be solved.
The newer approach is less about hiding and more about structure. Which fabrics hold you where you want to be held. Which cuts sit flat instead of bunching. Which pieces give you the silhouette you’re actually going for.
Shapewear used to be part of the “hide everything” era. Stiff, uncomfortable, the kind of thing you’d peel off the second you walked through your front door. I avoided it for years because the whole category felt like punishment.
Then a friend wore a bodysuit from getheyshape.com under a silk blouse at dinner and I could not figure out why her outfit looked so smooth. She told me she’d been wearing it since 8am. It was almost 10pm. I didn’t believe her, but she didn’t seem to be suffering, so I ordered one.
The part where I change my mind
I’ll be upfront: I was skeptical. I’d tried shapewear before and it always felt like a tradeoff. You get a smoother look, but you spend the whole night adjusting, overheating, or unable to eat a full meal. The cost-benefit math never worked out.
The HeyShape bodysuit was different in a way I didn’t expect. It was firm where I wanted support, around my midsection and lower back, but it didn’t squeeze everywhere. I wore it under a fitted dress to a work event and forgot about it by the second hour. That’s the highest compliment I can give a piece of clothing: I stopped noticing it was there.
They use some kind of flexible boning structure that keeps the garment from rolling down, which is the thing that always ruined shapewear for me before. Every other brand I’d tried would migrate south by lunchtime, and I’d spend the rest of the day doing that awkward tug-and-adjust move in bathroom stalls. This one stayed put. There’s also a mesh panel that actually breathes. I wore it through a full July day in the city, subway commute included, and didn’t want to claw it off by evening. That alone put it ahead of every other option I’d tried.
What I actually learned
Here’s the thing I keep coming back to: the shapewear itself isn’t the point. What changed was how I thought about getting dressed.
For years, I treated my closet like a problem to solve every morning. Nothing fit right. Everything required adjustments, safety pins, a particular bra, standing at a specific angle. It was exhausting, and it made me dread events that required anything beyond jeans and a sweater.
Having a reliable base layer simplified everything. I stopped buying “maybe” pieces, the ones that almost work but need a specific undergarment that I’ll definitely forget to wear. I started buying things I actually liked, because I knew they’d sit the way I wanted them to.
My friend Sarah, who works in fashion PR here in Manhattan, put it well. She said most women own about thirty percent more clothes than they need because they keep buying around a fit problem instead of fixing the foundation. I’d never thought about it that way, but she’s probably right. My last closet cleanout was brutal.
The honest assessment
I’m not going to pretend shapewear fixed my relationship with my body. That’s a bigger project involving therapy, age, and slowly caring less about what other people think. But it did fix my relationship with my closet, which was its own source of daily frustration.
Not every piece from HeyShape worked for me. Their shorts-style option rode up on me, though I know others who love it. Their size range goes up to 6X, which means most women can actually find their fit rather than squeezing into the closest available option and hoping for the best.
If you’re where I was a year ago, standing in a fitting room, blaming yourself for the wrong thing, maybe try changing the foundation before you change the wardrobe. It’s a smaller fix than you’d think, and it costs less than another round of regret purchases you’ll return next week.
The clothes were never the problem. The starting point was.
Top pexels photo by Daria Obymaha
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