Currency Devaluations and Body Re-Evaluations

Currency Devaluations and Body Re-evaluations

As the dollar strengthened and the Turkish Lira weakened, shopping for U.S. clothing I just tolerated became financially unsound.

“What’s your size?”

Hearing it in Turkish magically softens the weighty question, which used to hit my chest with a thud. I study the no-nonsense woman standing before me and decide to lay my ignorance bare. We’re in Mavi Jeans, a popular Turkish brand with stores all over Istanbul. I had only bought pants once before in Turkey, where there are no 10s or 12s or 14s, and that was almost four years ago. I pull up my jacket and point to my thick legs: “I don’t know, what do you think?”

My mother likes to tell me that I was never fat, I was always just… bigger. I towered over my 4th grade teacher. Come 6th grade I was not only taller than all my classmates, but the boys I had all-consuming crushes on were often at eye level with my too-large breasts. Only once was I called fat — by a close friend — which resulted in a meltdown on the cold tiles of the bathroom floor in my childhood home. But I was surprisingly unfazed by my big body. I channeled my energy into sports, playing soccer, ice hockey, softball, and track — my larger size came in handy when shooting a slap shot or hitting a home run.

One aspect of my life always seemed to dredge up my latent body anxieties: shopping for clothes. As a kid, a surefire way to loathe myself was to go into the Limited Too and discover that everything in the store was too small for me. Or rummaging the racks in Abercrombie & Fitch and only finding teeny, tiny jean shorts in size 6 and below. I would ask for a bigger size, only to be informed (often accompanied by a judging up-and-down look) that this was as big as they went. If I tried on a piece of clothing and it didn’t fit properly, I took it off and promptly put on an invisible hairshirt, repenting for the sin of having an imperfect body. Clearly the clothes were not to blame — it was me.

I came to learn how to make shopping less painful. Dresses were almost always sure to fit my pear-shaped body, while most of my pants came from the J. Crew factory outlet — I was willing to put up with the piles of fabric at my ankles in exchange for trousers that weren’t too tight on my thighs. In college I went through a phase of wearing black stretchy gaucho pants from Target, a forgiving yet highly unfashionable garment. Throughout my teenage years and up until my mid-20s, I dressed myself in a way that avoided any reckoning with my body, which I still considered to be deeply flawed. On the surface I framed it as a truce of sorts between me and clothing stores, when in reality I felt like I was prostrating at the feet of the victor.

The Turkish saleswoman gives me the up-and-down and says, “32 waist, 30–31 length” with a certainty that I automatically distrust. She quickly gathers four pairs of jeans in styles named ‘Sophie’ and ‘Lindy,’ and ushers me to the fitting rooms. It’s February, 2016, just three months after my 30th birthday, yet I feel less like a confident adult and more like a lost kid. I close the heavy curtain, certain that the jeans won’t fit.

My irrational loyalty to shopping in the U.S. began in the summer of 2006, in between my sophomore and junior years of college. I was studying Turkish in Ankara, a capital city full of embassies but somehow light on foreigners. Living with a host family that spoke no English and taking Turkish 101 classes at a language school where most of the other students came from Russia, Central Asia, the Middle East, and North Africa, I spent a lot of time in my own head. I walked all over the city in the afternoons, ostensibly to stave off the crippling loneliness but also to break down what I saw as the mammoth muscles I had acquired from my training as a hammer thrower on the university track team.

Once a week I stopped in the Karum shopping mall to try on clothes at the posh Zara. I looked out of place in my long skirt from Walmart, my face red from all that walking, but I soldiered on to the fitting rooms with a stack of pants and shirts. The tops were always cut too narrow for my broad shoulders, while the pants — the largest size they had — threatened to rip as I shimmied them over my bulging quads. Yet each week the trousers were slightly less snug, and I could finally button them just before my course ended. I had achieved my goal — my legs were noticeably thinner — but I never purchased the Zara pants. In my mind, these were clothes for Europeans — thin, narrow, non-athletic Europeans — and not for large, American me.

I returned to Turkey after graduating from college, working and living in Ankara from 2008 until 2010. The little shopping I did in Ankara’s cavernous malls, where most residents spent their weekends, was for basics to layer over and, once, a dress to wear to a fancy wedding. I stuck to my routine of doing one big shop a year when back in the U.S., stopping at J. Crew, T.J. Maxx, Marshalls and maybe Old Navy and the Gap. Financially, this felt like the right move — the university I taught at was paying me in USD, and on the rare occasion that I did go shopping in Ankara, the prices in Turkish Lira seemed to be on par or above what they would be in the States. Plus, I knew where to find clothes that fit in the U.S., whereas in Turkey… well, like Zara that first summer in Ankara, nothing seemed to fit quite right. If I’m being honest with myself, it was this factor that overruled the others and precluded any rigorous calculation of exchange rates. I was happy to maintain the chilly accord I had worked so hard to reach with clothing stores in the U.S., assuming that I could never do better in Turkey, at least not with my body.

Money is what ended up forcing my hand. More specifically, the devaluation of the Turkish Lira. In 2012, after a two-year stint in graduate school in the States, I settled with my then boyfriend (now husband) in Istanbul, where we still reside today. On average in 2012, 1 USD equaled 1.80 Turkish Lira. In 2014 that jumped to 2.09 Turkish Lira and in 2015, 2.62 Turkish Lira. From the end of 2015 until today, the exchange rate has hovered between 2.80 and 2.90 Turkish Lira, sometimes peaking over 3.00 Turkish Lira. Whatever the reasons behind the strengthening dollar and faltering lira—and there are many—it has thrown my spending in the States in a new light: spending USD on clothing I just tolerate has become financially unsound.

I had this epiphany on a trip to visit family and friends in September, 2015. Like most of my annual visits home — I can usually afford one round-trip plane ticket from Istanbul to the U.S. per year — I set aside a day or two of my trip to buy clothes. However, my visit to Old Navy, the land of cheap skinny jeans, was fruitless, as was a trip to the usually-dependable T.J. Maxx. It was only while scouring the overstuffed jeans aisle at Nordstrom Rack in Chicago that I stumbled upon the gray Paige jeans. The waist was a bit big, but the skinny legs fit over my muscular calves. They were on sale for $79.97, down from $179. I bought them, using Nordstrom’s price comparison as proof that I had scored a good deal. Yet when I got home and calculated how much they cost in Turkish Lira — roughly 243 Turkish Lira at an exchange rate of 1 USD = 3.0383 Turkish Lira — I felt sick to my stomach. A few weeks earlier a friend had mentioned buying new jeans at Mavi, a Turkish store, for 110 TL. The math was taunting me.

The Mavi jeans slide on smoothly, no pulling or tugging to get them over my thighs. I button them easily, surprised at how accurately she guessed my size. Pulling aside the curtain, I peek my head out and see the saleswoman, an older woman and her daughter all studying the older woman’s butt in a pair of dark-wash jeans. I join them in front of the large mirror, still in shock at how well my jeans fit. Seeing me, the saleswoman turns me around so that my back is facing the two women and proceeds to explain how the various waist heights create slightly different shapes in the back. They contemplate this and compliment my choice of jeans, before returning to their fitting room.

As I stare in the mirror, I can’t find any fault with the pants — they feel soft and fit me like a glove. But what’s more, the shopping experience in Mavi seems so matter-of-fact in a way that it never was before: woman enters store to purchase clothes, store provides clothing options in her size. For someone who has always felt like her body has failed for not fitting into a store’s offerings — and not the other way around — this shopping trip to Mavi has sparked a thought: that maybe shopping shouldn’t be a battle, that maybe my body is fine as it is.

I buy the jeans for 139.99 TL, roughly $47.95 at an exchange rate of 1 USD = 2.9272 Turkish Lira. It’s cheaper than what I paid in the States for jeans of equal quality. Yet this purchase brings something else with it, something more than a few dollars saved — a crack in the truths I had fashioned about my body and how best to clothe it.

Emma Harper is an Istanbul-based writer and editor. Follow her on Twitter: @emineharper

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