Because Ghana is ahead of the curve

Cut to fit: women wearing traditional dresses in Ghana. Photograph: David Levene for the Guardian

Find high street shops hard work. I can't wear skinny jeans – the appearance of the drain pipe does not work with the calf muscles. Pants that fit my legs gape alive, or have what looks like the right-size life, in a sort of hypothetical so since I can't get them past my knees.

My body shape is not unusual – small waist, hips, legs strong. I'm proud of it, actually. I learned that shops to avoid, and where it is possible to find things that fit. When everything goes pear-shaped, pardon the pun, get a customized version of an expression of Hubert de Givenchy that boosts my morale. "Clothes should be done to adapt our bodies, our bodies are not made to measure for clothes".

The ability to design an entire wardrobe tailored is one of the major attractions of life in Ghana. Here there are no tailors on Savile Row or strut around the Pizzetti fashion weeks. They are unassuming men and women who sit in shipping containers-cum-workshop on almost every street in every city, leaned over sewing machines, making clothes that fit perfectly. I feel better dressed just at the sight of one of them, measuring tape their necks. They offer the promise of heavenly my private collection, such as design, and what are the best and only the template.

Friends who visit me in Ghana from the United Kingdom have taken to bring the precious fruit of their trawlers high-street – the few clothes that fit and flatter them perfectly – and getting them copied here multiple times in different colors and different prints.

Much loved purchases that do not fit well enough, or that they planned to slim but failed, can be picked up, taken, carried out, or whatever else is needed to make them look perfect. It is not only women – I had no idea that so many people found it difficult to buy pants that fit at the waist and not cut their blood circulation to the legs. Container-makers themselves are capable of doing surprisingly good clothes.

Say this is cheaper than haute couture or a stylist is a huge understatement. Is much less you could justify a plane ticket to Ghana. It is also significantly less annoying than watching Gok Wan or filling out questionnaires "fruit garden that my body looks like" in magazines. Is the ultimate anti-Abercrombie Fitch & experience.

I am the image of the female body believe problems are with their clothes. Women in Europe and America might think it would look better if they were more subtle, but that is just an abbreviation for thinking if they were thinner, look better in their clothes. I think this with revelations of women starving themselves to achieve the zero size, fainting on a regular basis and have a hospital bed for a second home when a drop becomes the indispensable accessory of the diet.

But if these issues are intrinsically originate from clothes – then can they be exported with them, too? European clothes are all the rage in West Africa now, that it's almost like a worst-case scenario of UK high street. Never mind the fact that people in developed countries that they are donating clothes to charity and not to some enterprising reseller in Ghana and Nigeria that is flogging them on the roadside. But for women who buy them – as a cheaper alternative to get your clothes made – are buying on cuts and sizes are designed for completely different body shapes to them, that are used, and where there is only one dimension to choose from.

The results are already showing. The curves – and the women of Ghana are indeed curvy – that look so attractive in custom-made costumes and Africans, quickly become a sea of flat belly, muffin tops and spilling over into those breasts. I started noticing girls caressing their bellies ruefully as the edges appear through the maxi-sticky clothes. Are just one, small step from self loathing feeling. Tailors, the country needs!

Eva Wiseman is via

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