I recently received a promotional email from Everlane, a once online now flag-shipped Soho-based clothing store, famous for their high-rise skinny jeans (even Gal Gadot is wearing them!). The promo was for a new type of pants they were selling, some cross between ankle pants and bootcut jeans that I have seen before, but nevertheless, do not understand. The tagline for the pants was that they were “guaranteed to make you look taller.” I, standing at somewhere in the five foot ten range, asked myself as I read the email, “Why in the hell would I want that?”

I have spent my entire life trying to look smaller. Because being tall generally comes with having proportionately larger features, shoulders, and feet, I have always felt “bigger” and in that respect insecure about my own body. I am heavier on paper, though perhaps that’s just because there’s more that goes into making me than someone who’s five inches shorter than me, and given my German birthing hips, I have always felt wider. It’s not easy being tall, from the perspective of a tall person. While there are certainly plenty of benefits to being above average height, such as being able to reach even the highest of shelves in one’s kitchen and never having to worry about floodwaters rising and dampening the bottom of your pants, it's not something that I would wish on anybody— as I’m sure someone of below average height would not wish their genetic makeup on anyone either.

We always want what we can’t have. As a kid I wanted glasses because I thought they would make me look smart, and as a preteen I wanted straight hair when all the hair on my head started to grow in curly, and now I just struggle with the general malaise of being twenty and often feeling forty. I guess that’s why it would make sense to want to look taller because tallness is often associated with supermodels and Taylor Swift and not the actual realities of being tall like achy joints and cold ankles.

Telling women it’s important or attractive to look tall is the same as saying it’s attractive to be thin or to be curvy or to have blue eyes or to have tan skin; it’s just another beauty standard to be set for women that’s nearly impossible to fulfill. I guess the problem here isn’t that Everlane is selling jeans to make women look taller, but that they are projecting the idea that you can and should look different than you do. I guess the problem isn’t that women want to look taller, but that women want to look not like themselves, and that the fashion industry (in conjunction with the beauty and fitness industries) promotes this sort of insecurity.

Perhaps the most important part of companies such as American Eagle using “regular” women to model their clothing is that it enables women to see themselves as not being held to a set and specific beauty standard; that is to say that not everyone can be Kendall Jenner and should not be expected to be built in such a way. With women being able to see women of all sizes and all builds promoting clothing and makeup, perhaps the desire to be tall will fade into a desire to be one's best self. Until women can fully see themselves as being their best self, I suppose Everlane will continue to exploit my tallness, without exploiting my proportionately wide hips and long arms, my freezing ankles or the bumps on my head.