by Cathy
In the words of Salt n' Pepa:
Ladies, all the ladies, louder now, help me out, c'mon, all the ladies!
Salt n' Who? you ask?
I don't care if I've just aged myself, because ladies, the truth must be told. The lies are over. I am here to tell you to stop frontin' and fakin' it. We all know that size really does matter and that we get no pleasure in fooling ourselves to believe otherwise.
Women come in vast shapes and sizes - big, small, narrow, wide, long, short and a trillion combinations of all of the above. So why do we settle? Yes, you know what I'm talkin' 'bout.
Clothes.
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| You're lying to yourself if you think otherwise, okaaayy? |
Before the European Invasion of clothing stores hit the U.S., (H&M, Zara, TopShop, et al) we were perfectly content with the deceptive yet confidence-boosting sizing tactics created by savvy marketers to make us think our waistlines were shrinking, when in fact? They were NOT. Everyone miraculously went down at least one or two sizes while remaining the same physical size. We wonderingly yet gleefully emerged from fitting rooms ready to exchange the size we thought we were for a smaller size. I'm shopping here from now on, we all thought. And we did. At this store, I'm a size 4! But we weren't.
Then? Those starkly pragmatic tell-it-like-it-is Europeans, with their highfalutin designers, ostentatious fashion shows, and a waif-like fan following (because apparently, no one in Europe eats) have decided to not be so kind. In fact, they have gone one step beyond true sizing in the opposite direction, and cut their clothing slimmer and tighter than the wardrobe of a streetwalker.
I went shopping at Zara recently. Part of my husband's birthday gift to me was a shopping excursion to a place of my choice. Armed with his credit card, a day to myself and that world-is-my-oyster feeling, I opened the doors to Zara on Michigan Avenue and breathed in the smell of all that leather, that fashion, that "I'm gonna get me some new clothes!" energy.
Like any fashion-conscious woman, I had a punch list of some basics I needed: something with a leopard print, another pair of skinnies, and for good measure, a black leather jacket. So I began browsing through a table of neatly folded skinny jeans in an array of muted colors. "OOOOh, these are cute!" I mused aloud, feeling my pulse accelerating. (Yes, this does happen when I shop.) So I filed through the color of my choice and only saw a slew of 0s, 2s and 4s. There was one size 6 and I reluctantly grabbed it while knowing full-well I would look much less hookerish in a size 8. So I asked the petite (of course) sales associate.
"Do you have any other sizes besides what's out?"
"What size are you looking for?"
"An 8," I replied cautiously.
"Ooooh. I don't know if they go up that high," she replied matter-of-factly as she started filing through the other colors.
That high?!?! Was she kidding me?!
"Really?" I replied, feeling my blood boil. "You consider size 8s high? Hmpf. I guess you do."
How about the fact that all of the average-sized women may have already grabbed all the bigger sizes and left all the small sizes for the much less smaller demographic? Or do they purposely order more of the smaller sizes to weed out anyone over a size 6? The embarrassed sales associate now buried her nose in the skinnies stacks while shuffling around trying to find something that would accommodate me and get me on my merry way. She finally handed me a size 8 in another style. I grabbed it along with a cute peplum leopard top I noticed, turned on my heel and headed towards the fitting room, my good shopping mood now downgraded to annoyed.
The pants fit me just fine but the top? I realized, I as shimmied my way into the size medium top that there was no room allotted for women with breasts bigger than an A cup size. As I sized up the way my once full boobs looked, now plastered down and oblong-shaped in this otherwise cute top, my mood was officially killed.
I ended up buying those size 8 skinnies, went home and told my husband about the experience.
"Don't feel bad," he said. "That's why I don't even bother shopping outside the brands I already know fit me," he continued. "Those European places cut their men's clothes super slim too. There's no way a man with a chest can actually fit into any of their clothes." I realized he was right. All of those male models now look like you could snap them in half, all manorexic, deflated and wilted - just like their female counterparts.
It wasn't just me. Or just women, for that matter. Men are facing the same issues with size. Apparently, size matters to everybody. Just remember that the next time you hear about another European brand slinking its way across the Atlantic and into our psyches. And pray that you are in the mood. To shop.
