The long awaited summer months are upon us and with the scorching hot days comes shopping for new summer apparel. Now probably more than half of you rolled your eyes at the thought of shopping for warm weathered clothes, and it’s because of the inconsistency with the U.S woman’s sizing system.
As many of you know, when shopping for shorts it is expected that you will need to bring numerous pairs into the dressing rooms because you range over a multitude of sizes depending on what style you’re shopping for, or what store you are in. But why is that? What’s a girl gotta do to be able to make a quick trip to buy shorts without worrying about how the employees aren’t going to let you bring in the thirty pairs you have in your hand.
The ever so dreaded moment of trying on your first pair of shorts for the season has arrived and as you look at yourself in the mirror, eyes locked onto your pasty white thighs, you can physically feel your self confidence plummet… it’s okay we’ve all been there.
If you haven't seen the recent and widely shared Facebook post by Missy Rogers, she discussed her shopping experience at American Eagle when she realized her usual size in shorts wasn’t going up past her knees. This is the moment where any woman would have a panic attack trying to relive the past year and think how it was possible to gain so much weight without noticing. This was not the case here. Missy Rogers went home and compared her size 4 shorts, to the size 10 she had to buy this year in order for the shorts to properly fit. When comparing the shorts, Missy realized that the waist band of the two different sizes was the same, the only difference being the length of the shorts. How is it possible that todays size 10 was a size 4 two years ago? And how is that supposed to make women feel?
And it’s not just shorts that seem to be shrinking. If you’re bigger chested, trying on bathing suit tops is just a chore because you know when you go into the store the larger sizes still seem to show too much. How is someone supposed to feel comfortable at the beach when they are constantly adjusting their top and afraid that people are judging their choice in their bathing suit.
In a research paper I wrote last semester I stumbled across the fact that eighty percent of ten year old girls are afraid of being fat. Eighty percent! The body shape standard in the media is what young women pay the most attention to to be confident and comfortable with their body image and size, and these days the media is portraying that in order to be beautiful you have to be thin, and this “ideal” body is becoming more and more unattainable.
Our society is bombarded with pictures of the “ideal” body image on billboards, magazines and TV commercials, but the target audience of these ads is unaware of the amount of digital editing that goes into making the advertisements we see every day. We should not be hammering the brains of adolescents with the idea that you need to be skinny in order to be healthy or for people to applaud your looks. We should be embodying the concept that every body is different, yet all body types are equally as beautiful.
Basically what I’m saying is when you step up out of the dressing room and grab the next size up in the shorts you were trying on, who cares that the number on the tag is in the double digits. Don’t turn to the internet and google “how to lose weight fast”, because you will indeed be bombarded with hundreds of articles consisting of tricks and recipes to shed belly fat in order to obtain that dream body. Hate to break it to you but those tricks probably won’t work. Just remember that size is just a number and you are so much more than that number.
All I’m asking is for you to dress for yourself, buy clothes that you look and feel comfortable and confident in… oh and a consistent sizing system for women’s clothing.
