'The wardrobe diet' was the headline of a first-person piece this Sunday in the Style section of the Sunday Times. The writer, Francesca Gavin, explains how the fashion of recent years for smocks and voluminous draped clothing allowed her to gain weight unnoticed. She then lost the weight by forcing herself into tight tailored outfits which simply refuse to let the stomach expand a centimetre. The piece is illustrated by a box on how to 'dress yourself thin' with waist-girdling belts and tight dresses and skirts.
'If I literally restricted my clothes...my flesh would inch off,' she writes. 'At first it was darned uncomfortable. Eating is hard if your stomach is bound by fabric...I kept in mind Joan Collins's mantra about a flat stomach - if you hold it in at all times, it will stay there.'
Of course in centuries gone by, women submitted to tight, boned clothing in exactly this way, knowing the very act of wearing it regularly would 'train' the figure to be smaller.
Today, we are free to dress baggily in the morning, knowing we have a big lunch ahead. We rely on our clothes getting tight to tell us when we are expanding. It can go too far. Many women feel fat and dress in clothes that are too loose, not realising that body-skimming clothes would actually show off their figures to their advantage.
For the sake of being thin, is it worth being perpetually in discomfort and never able to slob out on the sofa in sweatpants and baggy t-shirts?
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