As I browse through the multiple clothing isles and try on probably the seventh pair of awkwardly cut and fit jeans today, I stop and ask myself a couple questions: Should it really be this hard? Is it just me?
I look up at the models wearing the brand I just tried on, I don’t really look like any of them, but we aren’t so different that every pair of jeans I try on should look awful and not fit right.
It’s always been like this too, it’s incredibly hard to find a pair of jeans that fit me correctly, I think I have owned about three pairs in my life. For a while, I brushed this off as the fact that my heritage is Northern European, I’m not built like most American women, my proportions are different.
A few months ago, I was shopping with friends and I realized something: it’s not just me. As we browsed and tried on different things I noticed the sizes of things: everything labeled small was ridiculously tiny and everything labeled large seemed to be a pretty normal size.
But for some reason we live in a culture where if you wear a top labeled large that somehow means you’re not ideal. And we look up at those models and look down at the large size clothing we are buying, and we feel bad about ourselves.
The crappy part comes next when we try to make ourselves fit into those extra small and small labeled clothing. I remember trying to do this through most of highschool.
Finally I got to the point where I felt like the clothing industry was engineered to make women feel bad about their bodies. I wanna know why.
I did a little bit of research into how companies determine the sizing for their clothing lines, and found an interesting site called createafashionbrand.com. This site was made for aspiring fashion designers and companies to determine how to size their clothing.
After reading through the sites section on standard measurements, I found that how companies get their measurements is actually from a survey of the area or country they sell to. Essentially, a pull of people are measured and their measurements put into a spreadsheet that averages everything out.
While this is probably one of the few ways to effectively size clothing for such a large population of consumers, it sadly doesn’t change the culture we live in, and the way women have learned to view their bodies in negative ways.
I’ve decided to hell with that, and I stopped looking at size labels when I try stuff on. We never wear the same size across clothing brands anyways, since they all likely pull from different surveys of standard measurements, so just eyeball it and find something that makes you feel good, ignore the label.
Now this certainly hasn’t solved all my problems, I still can’t find a pair of jeans that fit, but I’m trying to stop feeling bad about myself for buying something that isn’t the size I think I should fit in.
Cerridwyn Kuykendall
Managing Editor