Bah, ribcage!

I am a person of petite dimensions, and of the good fortune to be proportionately built in practically all measures. It makes buying clothes a lot easier, as the retail clothing industry tends to assume there is kind of one general figure and makes each successful size just larger in all dimensions according to those proportions. But time and again, I am confounded by my one feature that is decidedly OUT of proportion with the rest of me, the one that just happens to be my least favorite physical feature, my monstrous blocky ribcage.

A while ago I was reading an article about retail dress sizes that included the measurements they generally conform to for various fitting points. Despite the fact that real people are rarely "standard" shapes, there are a certain confluence of measurements that are expected to coincide in people that dictates their size. For example, for a woman of a given height, she is predicted to have a bust of so many inches, a waist of so many inches, so on and so forth, and that's how they determine the dimensions of a size. For mine, let's call it size X, because what number they actually put on the size is all over the place depending on the manufacturer-- it tends to get considered everything from a double-zero to a four. My height, hips, bust, waist, and shoulders were almost exactly right for size X. My band size? Almost three inches LARGER than the measure predicted. In many systems that three SIZES above where the rest of me falls.

Of course I didn't need a numerical breakdown to tell me that. I don't know how many beautiful things have fit me everywhere except for the uncomfortable binding over my ribs. It's a curse modeling samples, because it's the one part that doesn't conform. The only upside is that it's not usually super-visible in how well it fits me, it just feels really uncomfortable. It sucks being restricted in a place that's supposed to expand even farther out when you breathe. And it's not a matter of weight or anything, this is the shape of my skeleton, so there's nothing I can do to change it.

Look at this. I love this dress and it looks great on me in most ways, but still, when I sit a certain way you can see how the material is pushed on by my monstrous ribcage trying to punch its way out.

Ugh. My stupid ribs are one of the reasons I want to stay so thin. They're so oversized that they blend into a wider waistline and make me look blocky. They're not even freaking EVEN, the left side comes out farther than the right, made worse by the fact that my hernia surgery on the right side seems to have included the complete removal of the patch of muscle immediately below the ribs.

They are easily my coarsest, most unfortunate, least liked feature. And I especially hate it when it makes me feel like a cow when I try on pretty things that fit nicely everywhere else.