The top story on CNN.com today is entitled “As nation gains, ‘overweight’ is relative.” And the title pretty much explains the gist of the article – Americans today perceive themselves as being less overweight than they did a decade or so ago, despite the fact that the average person has gotten a little larger. We see our body size as it compares to the people around us, and heavy is becoming normal.
They start off the article with a discussion of “vanity sizing.” They say size 10 is the new 14, and retailers are enlarging their sizes to make us feel as though we were shrinking, when in reality our waistlines are expanding. Case in point: i’ve been shopping at Express for jeans since high school. Back then, i wore a size 3/4. Toward the end of high school, i’d moved up to a size 5/6. But then in college, the 5/6es in the store started to seem baggy, and although my body hadn’t changed i moved back down to the size 4. By the end of college, again although my body hadn’t really changed, i was wearing a size 2 at Express, as i am today.
Now, i saw a photograph of myself that someone had taken from behind me a few weeks ago, and i said to myself “that is not a size two butt!!”
So, i launched into a Google search for the history of dress sizes and what my actual measurements would have translated to in the days of size-fourteen-Marilyn-Monroe. Alas, i could find no such size chart, but feeling incensed that Express had so misled me, i researched vanity sizing and found that it isn’t some manipulation of our collective psychosis, but a practical measure that the fashion industry has no choice but to take.
This article i came across on Fashion Incubator explains that each retailer has number or relative (S/M/L) designations which range across its garments from smallest to largest, and each retailer has a different range depending on who buys the garments. For example, if you make tutus, your “large” is still going to seem tiny to the average person, because ballerinas are necessarily tiny people. It would be impractical to have standardized sizing across all garments and retailers, because then ballerinas would have to choose among XS, XXS, XXXS. Makes sense, right?
So, the retailers aren’t just stroking our egos by making their size twos as big as sixes used to be. People are getting bigger. If you’re Express and people stop buying your size zero because nobody is that small anymore, and you start getting harassed by people for not carrying size fourteen (discriminating!), doesn’t it make sense to make all the garments bigger, but keep the old number scale?
Maybe we’re pointing the finger at the wrong industry. Maybe we should take exercise and nutrition into our own hands and stop claiming to be victimized by pop culture and the fashion industry that is supposedly slave to it. Or, just maybe, we could stop judging one another and ourselves and start to just be comfortable with the bodies that our culture produces. I think there are a lot of forces at work in this problem, but i’ve come to realize that perhaps the least of them is so-called vanity sizing.
Friday, July 10th, 2009 11:27 am • clothes, culture
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July 10th, 2009 at 1:48 pm
Very well put. And I’ll be the first to admit that I shine for hours after fitting into a size 2. It makes me feel good and that in turn encourages me to maintain my good habits. And go back to the store where I fit into the size 2.
July 10th, 2009 at 2:41 pm
Maybe they should just start sizing womens jeans the way that they do mens jeans. A size 30×32 is never going to be anything but 30×32.
July 10th, 2009 at 9:29 pm
Actually I think in light of the expanding universe and some startling revelations from string theory, they’re planning on expanding the inch…
July 11th, 2009 at 12:25 pm
Hullo Steph
Great post as always. While I agree to your comment about where the blame lies and where we point the finger, I have to wonder how much culture has got to take some responsibility. That said, who makes up culture, but us?
On one hand we’re bombarded with cheaper foods, fast foods, convenience foods, and others, designed to taste good and provide little to no nutritional value, that add to a host of potential risks for diabetes, obesity, even gout and scurvy, which was disease in the 1700s.
On the other, we’re being told to “eat better”, yet it’s hard to do so on a budget, especially for lower-income families. Recently, “Good Morning America” had a show on “how to feed a family for $50”, but it included the anchors haggling over the price of a piece of fruit in a grocery store and getting away with it, not something that “average Mr & Mrs America” can do.
We’re told to “shop carefully” and try to eat wholesome foods, but with many people working incredibly hard, often both parents, there just isn’t the time any more. Nor is there the money. Eating decent food isn’t cheap. You can find the occasional bargain, but things that fill growing kids are much cheaper than eating healthy, and that, unfortunately, is what happens in many cases. Even so-called “organic” food has become little more than an excuse to add to the price of an item.
Then we’re hit up with the thin “beautiful” people who are stars and given their “diet secrets” in tabloid magazines, in many cases possible if you have your own personal chef.
With all that said, I agree that we are responsible for what we eat, but the selection of affordable healthy foods is limited. We are responsible for our lifestyle. You don’t have to belong to a gym in order to keep fit, but again, tiredness, time and a host of other issues crop up there too.
I’m certainly not advocating placing blame on “someone” as we seem to do so often, but the same people who give us all this rubbish are the same ones that tell us that this rubbish is bad for us, but they won’t stop doing so. The money that is made with product placement, allows those who profit from their products to eat better than most of the rest of us.
I’m all for letting us decide what we want to eat and look like. I just wish the self-appointed elite would let us get on with it instead of speaking from both sides of their mouths at once.
Apologies for hijacking your post
Cheers,
Dave
July 11th, 2009 at 8:42 pm
I totally agree with Kathy on this one.
Although…it’s not very helpful to those who really need to lose the weight to be healthy.
To put it in perspective: Marilyn Monroe had a 24-inch waist and supposedly wore a size 12. I have a 27-inch waist and supposedly wear a 4.
July 13th, 2009 at 7:40 pm
This phenomenon of vanity sizing has always baffled me as well, and gives us false hopes of our dieting efforts. I especially noticed this when my “size 2″ cousin was playing dress-up prior to her wedding and couldn’t even zip up my grandmother’s wedding dress. The widening of our waistlines seems to be increasing at an exponential rate. It begs me to ask the question is it just laziness and unhealthy behavior or is it evolution as people are taller than ever before as well?
July 21st, 2009 at 9:48 pm
I had a variety of reactions to this but I can’t even remember them all because there were so many.
First off – I pretty much hate everything having to do with sizing and body image because, quite frankly, everything having to do with these things has shot my self esteem all to hell. Back when I was in high school, I was thin and healthy but I felt “fat” because that is what I was made to believe I was. Looking back at pictures from then, I am appalled (and jealous) of how skinny I was. I’ve put on a lot of weight since college and haven’t been able to get rid of any of it. I’m clinically overweight, and though I don’t consider myself to be “fat” or “obese” I definitely hate the way I look and feel especially when compared to others. It’s weird that the cultural norm is that everyone is getting bigger… because I feel that everywhere I look, everyone is smaller than me and I’m still pressured to be as skinny as a twig, even if that’s not really realistic or possible for my build.
As far as sizing goes, if they’re buffering sizes, then God help me. If sizing is being generous, I don’t know what that says when I keep climbing up the size chart. I will never, ever, ever fit into a size 2 (my senior prom dress was a size 5, I was strapped into that thing, but yes – I felt rather triumphant that I could fit into that! Now, it would maybe fit around my thigh…), no matter how much vanity they size into it.
It’s funny how culture changes, though. Marilyn Monroe was considered voluptuous and curvy, but I could probably snap her in half. I wish big was considered beautiful, like it used to be in the *mumble mumble* period (yeah, whatever, I learned nothing in art history). I’d be a rock star, ha.
I understand about having to average the means for sizing, though, when you make an example about it. Although I HAVE seen things offered in an XXS… and I don’t even know how size “0″ works because to me that seems like it shouldn’t exist…
I completely lost my train of thought and where this was going. It’s really quite thought-provoking, though… wonder where we’ll end up ten, twenty years from now? How everyone will be sized? What the new “norm” will be? If my ass will ever fit into a size 4? Hmm….