I Was Two Sizes at Once, and the Fashion Industry Had No Place for Me

I am tall. I have always been tall. And for most of my life, I have also been two completely different sizes ,one at the top, another at the bottom. A size 12 waist and a size 16 hip. Shoulders that needed room. A torso that was long enough to make any standard hemline irrelevant.

I knew my measurements like I knew my name. I had to. Because walking into a shop and just buying something was never that simple for me. It was a negotiation. It was a project. It was, on too many days, a small defeat I would carry home in a bag I never opened.

I remember the frustration, not just as an inconvenience, but as something that got under my skin. You would find a top that fit your shoulders perfectly and it would be too short. You would find trousers in the right length and the waist would gape. You would try on a dress that looked beautiful on the hanger, and on your body it would be something else entirely: too tight across the hips, too loose at the chest, too short to be decent, too long to look intentional. The mould the fashion industry had built was simply not made for a body like mine.

"The mould the fashion industry built was not made for a body like mine, and the fashion industry never seemed to notice, or care."

And the fashion industry never seemed to notice. Or care. The sizing charts were built on an imagined woman, a composite, an average, a fiction. She was proportional in ways most real women are not. She did not have my height or my hips. She did not have your story either, whatever shape that comes in.

What I did not understand at the time, what took me years to fully see, was the cost of all of that. Not just the practical cost of paying a tailor every few months to fix things that should have fit. But the quieter cost. The toll on how I carried myself. The way you learn, slowly and without realising it, to make peace with clothes that almost fit. And in making peace with almost, you start to make peace with almost enough. Almost worthy of something that was made for you. Almost confident.

That is not a small thing. That is how a lot of women move through the world, wearing almost, settling for close enough, adjusting themselves to fit the garment rather than the garment being adjusted to fit them.

"Confidence is not a personality trait. It is partly a felt sense of being seen, of taking up space that was made for you."

Confidence is not a personality trait you either have or you do not. It is partly a felt sense of being seen. Of walking into a room in something that was made for you, not made for the imagined woman, not made for the mannequin, not made with a grudging alteration in the seam. For you. And when your body is consistently told, in the language of every fitting room and every size chart, that it falls outside the range of what is considered normal, that message lands somewhere deep. It shapes how you hold yourself. It shapes how much space you allow yourself to take up.

That frustration is what started NAWIRI.

Not as a business idea that came out of a spreadsheet or a market gap report. As a lived experience. As the memory of too many dressing rooms and too many clothes that didn't fit and too many women I knew who had the same story, even if the details were different. Some were petite and found nothing long enough. Some were fuller-figured and were offered shapeless things that hid them rather than dressed them. Some were between sizes and were told to size up, as though their body was the problem to be accommodated, not the system that refused to account for them.

Real bodies do not come in standard sizes. They come in proportions. They come in histories. They come in the reality of African women's bodies specifically, bodies that the global fashion industry has, for a very long time, designed around least of all.

At NAWIRI, we make clothes for real bodies. We make clothes for the woman who is two sizes at once. We make clothes with room where room is needed and structure where structure is wanted. We do made-to-measure, and we do micro-customisation, because we believe that the garment should do the work, not the woman wearing it.

But more than that, we believe we are not really selling clothes. We are selling something that clothes can carry, when they are made right: the feeling of being dressed in something that belongs to you. The ease of walking into a room without adjusting anything. The quiet steadiness of knowing that you look exactly the way you meant to.

"We are selling confidence disguised as women's clothing."

That is what we are selling at NAWIRI. Confidence, disguised as women's clothing. For every body that was ever told it was the wrong size. For every woman who left a fitting room quieter than she walked in. For every tall girl who was two sizes at once and had no idea that was not her problem to solve.

It was never your problem. It was always the mould.