With the recent American Eagle Facebook post going around about how AE jeans that were once labeled size 4 are now size 10, I’ve gotten to a lot of thinking about the number scales we have for labeling clothes and what they mean.
At first, I rolled the AE jean story off my shoulder until the next day when I went to the mall with my mom. We went into a Lululemon store where we wanted to try on yoga pants and running jackets. I went into the store, grabbed the clothes I wanted in the sizes I’ve always worn and went to the fitting room. To my dismay the size 2 I usually wore wasn’t fitting me the way it used to. So I went out to grab more sizes and ended up being a size 6. I work at a boutique in my home town and at our store's size 6 is equivalent to a medium, so I was a little confused at how my size had changed when I’m definitely a small.
At Lululemon, they consider a size 6 to be the larger end of a small. At first I was really upset that I had gone up two sizes, until I realized that Lululemon is actually doing us women a huge favor. They’re making the size 0 nearly impossible to wear, because 0 isn’t a size. Like actually, the number 0 symbolizes nothing and I’m all for being thin and fit, but a size 0… why is that an achievement? I genuinely appreciate that a 4 and a 6 are considered a small, and an 8 can be considered a medium. It can do wonders for a girl’s confidence when someone skinny that wears a “small” is rocking a “4” or a “6”, because we all exist, we all take up space, so we should wear a clothing size that really exists.
Don’t get me wrong, to the beautiful skinny girls with six packs, you know we’re all jealous of you. But, for some of us lacking a six pack, no matter how hard we work it just isn’t in our genetics.
What breaks my heart is knowing that no matter how hard stores like Lululemon try, because clothing stores and the media have created such an unattainable image, there will always be women out there upset that they aren’t the “size 0”. Clothing stores create labels that say “XXS” or “XXS Petite” or “00”. Like really? Can’t the super skinny girls just wear a 2 and then grow up from there? It’s saddening to know that at a lot of stores a “2” is the end of the small scale, when in reality 2 is the first number that we can really measure with.
Like I mentioned previously, I work at a store where women constantly come in and try clothes on, and they’ll ask me to grab the size up in a dress or a pair of pants. When they come out of the fitting room I’ll ask them, “did you find anything you liked?” I can’t even express to you the amount of times when a woman has told me, “well I’m not the size I used to be, so I’m going to hold off until I lose some weight.”
I could go on a tangent for hours about how mad it makes me that media and corporations make people feel this way. But for the record, retail stock prices are reaching new lows, and it’s because no one wants to buy clothes that make them feel big, even if it’s a number no one can see. Retail stocks are sinking just as they have been doing to the numbers on their tags. So let them shrink and feel bad about themselves, but ladies, let’s not.
