Fashion Hurts

"Meg's high-heeled slippers were very tight and hurt her, though she would not own it, and Jo's nineteen hairpins all seemed stuck straight into her head, which was not exactly comfortable, but, dear me, let us be elegant or die."

—Louisa May Alcott, Little Women, "Chapter 3"

Fashion is a funny thing. You'd think that people would want to wear garments, shoes, and accessories that were comfortable and serviceable, but as many a person with blistered feet can attest, clothing and footwear aren't always designed with comfort in mind. Some people protest and opt to wear only pain-free fashions. Others suffer, because we must be elegant or die. Painful hairpins, ill-fitting shoes, scratchy sweaters, choking neckties, sharply pointed Victorian collars . . . oh yes, fashion hurts. Painfully, this is Truth in Television: the fashion-minded have choked and mutilated themselves in various ways as long as the concept of fashion has existed.

Though it's often played for comedy, Fashion Hurts can also be invoked by a work in order to create An Aesop about the vanity of focusing too much on physical appearance at the expense of health or comfort. Refusing to wear the painful fashion sometimes becomes an act of rebellion; alternatively, those not wise enough to realize the absurdity of fashion may become the subject of ridicule.

See Of Corset Hurts for all corset or girdle-related pain.

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Examples of Fashion Hurts include:

Anime and Manga

• In the pilot episode of the Wandering Son anime, when Suuichi dresses for middle school for the first time, he complains about the collar of his uniform being uncomfortably tight. (In this case, the pain of having to wear the uniform extends beyond physical pain.)

Comics

• During Jean Grey and Storm's first social outing in X-Men, Jean is horrified to see that Ororo is naked after she whisks away her superhero costume, since her Kenyan tribe had no nudity taboo. Jean hurriedly finds something for Ororo to wear, who mentions that the outfit is uncomfortable. Jean replies, "Just don't breathe or sit down and you'll be fine." After getting used to Western fashion, Ororo generally averts this trope, preferring loose-fitting garments (her Punk phase notwithstanding) and sensible shoes.

Film

• Truvy in Steel Magnolias has this to say about shoes "In a good shoe, I wear a size six, but a seven feels so good, I buy a size eight." meaning she's a size eight but will squeeze down to a six for the right shoe.
• An indirect example: in Clueless Cher notes that she sometimes enjoys kicking back and relaxing more than partying, then suggests that this might because her party clothes are so "binding."

Literature

• In Ramona Forever, Ramona and Beezus are forced to wear too-small shoes to a wedding. (They eventually rebel by tying them to the newly-married couple's getaway car.)
• In Little Women, Jo and Meg were willing to put up with too-tight shoes and painful hairpins in order to be properly dressed for a New Year's Eve party.
• Young Peter Cratchitt from A Christmas Carol borrows a shirt collar from his father in honor of Christmas Day. The collar nearly chokes him, according to the narrator, but he's still proud to wear it.
• Plutarch used this as an analogy in the 1st century CE, making this Older Than Feudalism: "A Roman divorced from his wife, being highly blamed by his friends, who demanded, 'Was she not chaste? Was she not fair? Was she not fruitful?' holding out his shoe, asked them whether it was not new and well made. 'Yet,' added he, 'none of you can tell where it pinches me.'"
• Hans Christian Andersen's "The Little Mermaid" had oysters attached to her tail by her grandmother to show her great rank.

Little Mermaid: "But they hurt me so."
Grandmother: "Pride must suffer pain."

• In The Pyrates, Black Bilbo insists on wearing a pair of red heeled boot that are too small for him (he took them off a dead man) because they are the latest fashion in Europe.
• One chapter of Wayside School is Falling Down is about Picture Day. Stephen, one of the students, is wearing a three-piece suit and tie. He explains (very matter-of-factly) to the class that "You have to wear uncomfortable shoes if you want to look important," and that "The more the tie chokes me, the better I look." Naturally, the class encourages him to pull the tie tighter and tighter until it's literally strangling him—which also makes him tremendously handsome.
• In Molly's last American Girl book, she's obsessed with curling her hair so she'll be more likely to get picked for the lead role in a patriotic dance for her tap class. After trying various increasingly uncomfortable methods, she resorts to one that involves sleeping with soaking-wet hair, which causes her to catch a cold and not be able to perform at all. The upside is that she's the only one home when her father comes back from the war.

Live Action TV

• In the first season of The Kids in The Hall, Dave Foley once played a fashion designer who created women's clothes meant to horribly injure the wearer. Designs included a pair of shoes made from boxes filled with broken glass and a railroad spike meant to go through a woman's head.
• In an episode of Everwood, Delia's grandmother refuses to let her take off her sweltering hot stockings, because "New York women are willing to suffer for fashion".
• In The IT Crowd, Jen crams her feet into a pair of shoes she loves even though they are a couple of sizes too small. And almost cripples herself in the process.
• The "dress" Amanda receives in the Ugly Betty episode "Icing on the Cake". Watch this compilation starting at 5:40. "Fashion is a pain," indeed.
• On Friends Monica insisted on buying a pair of expensive (and uncomfortable) boots over Chandler's objections. She quickly realized she couldn't wear them without wincing. Of course it didn't help when a party came up and he wanted her to wear them, using her own claim that they "go with everything" against her.
• Done subtly at the end of an episode of Mad Men in which Joan, on top of personal problems, hits the glass ceiling at work: getting undressed, she sits on her bed and rubs the spot on her shoulder where her bra strap has dug into it, symbolizing the burdens of being a woman.

Newspaper Comics

• In Calvin and Hobbes, Calvin, who's forced to dress up, compares a necktie to a hangman's noose.

Stand Up Comedy

• Parodied in Steve Martin's Cruel Shoes. That page has links to audio versions of the joke.

Western Animation

• In an episode of Daria, Quinn bought a cute pair of high heeled sandals and wore them everywhere despite them pinching her toes and swelling her feet to the point where she could barely walk.

Sandy: How are the shoes Quinn?
Quinn: They're killing me. But don't I look cute?

• • A later episode she mentions that she has to suffer for fashion and has a hair-dryer set on full blast.

Real Life

• An old, and no longer practiced, Chinese tradition was women having tiny dainty shoes. In order to make women's feet so small they would soak the feet of children then break the bones of and bound them tightly in linen to create tiny little feet. Sure, the down side was extreme pain and losing the ability to walk in many cases, but look at how small their feet are!
  • Note that Chinese women were always supposed to be seen by men in the "lotus shoes"—never barefoot. It was written that if a man were to look upon a woman's feet after they had been unbound, the effect would be ruined forever. One can clearly see why. (Warning: Nausea Fuel!) Supposedly they even smelled as bad as they looked.
• Chopines were tall platform shoes or overshoes worn during the 15th to 17th century in Western Europe, particularly Italy and Spain. The height varied greatly, from only a few inches to as much as 20 inches tall. As with corsets, there is controversy over whether they were as painful and difficult to wear as they look.
  • Some scholars insist that wearing them not only made wearer's footing and balance precarious, it also caused a gait rather like the lurching stomp typical of Frankenstein's Monster, but Fabritio Caroso, an Italian dancing master of the time wrote in 1600 that a woman practiced in wearing chopines could not only move gracefully in them, but also dance in them.
• It is practically customary for a girl or woman to wear high heeled shoes for a formal occasion. If she usually wears sensible shoes for everyday wear, she will "break them in" so that she can get used to wearing them and so be able to walk in them more gracefully, if not with less pain.
  • Of course, even women who aren't particularly fashion-conscious may find themselves roped into wearing heels every day as part of office Dress Codes.
  • The characteristic shape of formal shoes, putting the longest part in the center, causes a specific deformity common in American women where the big toe curves downwards and the little toe curves upwards.
  • New shoes are always this. If you expect to stand up in them a lot, it is normal to spend a few days gently damaging them until they are broken enough not to hurt anymore but not quite enough to look bad. Then you have a few weeks while they still look almost as good as new.
• Many black women will use "relaxers" to straighten their hair out, the style of which was known as a "conk". The relaxer not only alters the texture of the hair so that it's not straight, but it also burns the scalp, especially if it's an at-home kit rather than a salon treatment. Talk about adding injury to insult.
• Corsets used to be used in Europe in a similar way to the foot binding in China. Preteen girls would wear them at a given tightenness at all hours of the day, even when sleeping, in order to compress their waists into a desire shape and measurement.
• Such harmful fashions are not only excluded to the human race. In the 1800s, stylish carriage horses were often forced to wear "bearing reins" to keep their heads up, often to an extreme degree that maimed the poor animals. The practice was partially abolished in part to protests raised by Anne Sewell's famous novel, Black Beauty
  • The same goes for many pure bred cats and dogs, who often must endure crippling genetic diseases, and abnormalities for the sake of adhering to (rather capricious) standardized breeding shapes
• Oh heck, ask anyone. In the Real Life Headscratchers, a rather common musing was "Why are the formal-clothes so darn uncomfortable?"