Samantha Bee’s Gym Clothes

Whether it was the outfit you wore on your first date with your cutie or the outfit your wore when you got a gig. There are these special pieces of apparel that hold sentimantal value. The October ‘09  issue of  Elle Mag  featured an assortment of fun fashion related stories exploring different women’s relationships with a certain piece of clothing. In comparison to this fasco, I highly enjoyed it. As the publishing world  is striving to compete with digital media they have seldomely used the gems of the “ short  fashion story” that we can all agree are pretty cool to read on paper. One of those stories was Samantha Bee’s Gym Clothes that had me  laughing so hard I hard to share:

“One outfit perfectly encapsulated middle school for me. All the other children wore athletic garments, such as T-shirts and shorts, to gym class—we didn’t have a standard uniform, and we could wear what we wanted”…Complete story on the next page.

 But I was living with my grandmother at the time, so I would dress like a miniature grandmother, like Rue McClanahan from The Golden Girls. I used to go to gym in a one-piece leisure suit with a leather belt—it was dry-clean only. It was sort of like sweatpants fabric. A cashmere unitard with puffy sleeves is basically what I wore to gym. A full-length cashmere sweater with legs. And a belt! Navy blue with a brown leather belt. My grandmother would be like, “Don’t sweat—it’s dry-clean only!” and I would be like, “I’m not going to sweat. I don’t even know how to sweat. Let me belt it up!”

I would say anything to get out of gym. I had chicken pox when I was 10 and forever since I’ve had a little bump on the back of my head that never went away. It’s really nothing. But I showed up on rope-climbing day in my sweatertard thinking, This is it. I don’t have any more excuses. I made the teacher feel the chicken pox on the back of my head and told her I thought I had a tumor and it was bursting out of my head, and that I’d been advised by the doctor to abstain from all physical activity. “Really,” she replied. “You didn’t mention this all day until right when you’re supposed to climb a rope and ring the bell at the top? And now you have a brain tumor? You went to class all day and you’ve been here all week and I never heard anything about it, but today, at this moment, we are concerned about the brain tumor bursting out of your head?” So I sat and quietly read a book in my sweatertard, while all the other children climbed a rope, like normal children.

That outfit so perfectly sums up what I felt about gym and any kind of physical competition. Because you can’t work out in an outfit like that—it’s impossible. It’s ridiculous. And even now, my dislike of all athletic activity is perfectly embodied by the dry-clean-only outfit my grandmother made me wear to gym. She felt the same way I did. We just wanted to do our Jack LaLannes together. On a beach in Hawaii. We were not about jogging.

Samantha Bee in Elle Magazine October 2009. Photog.via Elle.