Size Inflation
By Betsy G
It doesn’t take a PhD to figure out that something funky is going on with women’s clothing sizes. As obesity increases in prevalence in the US, the fashion industry is responding with “vanity sizing,” meaning larger clothing is labeled with smaller sizes, enabling women to believe they are not as heavy as they truly are. (”Enabling” is the just the right word for this.)
The practice is also known as size inflation, parallel to the notion of grade inflation, in which higher grades are given to students to protect their self-esteem.
How big a problem is overweight and obesity in the US? The CDC has an illuminating slide show that demonstrates the increasing prevalence of obesity across the country. For example, on their map from 1991, you can see that only four states had obesity rates in the 15–19% range, with all the rest having lower rates.
But let’s look at the map from 2006. Two states have obesity rates greater than 30%, and only four states (yay, Massachusetts!) still have obesity rates in the 15–19% range, with all the others having a higher rate. Wow.
You can read about vanity sizing at whole bunch of sites, including Wikepedia. But really, what’s better than cold, hard evidence? At this time last year, I was within 10 pounds of obese. Yes, that is me with the extra set of knees, and I wasn’t even at my heaviest. Yet I never had to buy a pair of pants bigger than size 12! Now that I’m down about 30 pounds, I’ve been trying to find pants that fit, but the sizing is bizarre. So I went through my pants drawer, where all the pants that I’ve worn over a 40-pound range still reside, to gain a better understanding of just what has happened to clothing sizes.
The video shows the results of this archeological dig through the history of my pants sizes. And no, I do not have an obsession with showing my body, despite the two videos (Mommy Ass being the other one) that draw attention to it…
Anyhow, enjoy, and do note: I’m the “fatty” I’m referring to in this video, not you. (In a future posting I will share how I rather painlessly lost the weight.)
July 9th, 2008 at 5:21 am
Thank you for posting this. I did a similar post a couple of months ago - http://paperandyarn.blogspot.com/2008/05/pants-sizes.html - about this very thing. I’m glad to see it’s not just me. lol
July 9th, 2008 at 1:44 pm
If anything, your commentary on obesity explains size inflation altho I use the term in a different way than you do. I prefer the term sizing evolution. I wish you had followed the links in the wikipedia article, specifically the one written from the perspective of manufacturers. If anything, your comments on obesity prove my points. Let me explain.
The average size for women in the US will ALWAYS be a 10. The reason being, a size 10 is the middle of a manufacturer’s size spread. For efficient fabric cutting, you need the same number of sizes off to either side of the median size (the default is 10). Long story. Anyway, this is why sizing evolves. As women get heavier, the dimensions that constitute the “average size” will increase to match their increasing girth. This explains why we’re not wearing clothes sized to match people who lived in the 1800s.
Lately, the situation has become markedly worse resulting in so-called “vanity sizing,” because young people today are much heavier than when we were their ages, and since they buy twice as many clothes as we do, their financial pull has the weight (no pun intended) to alter the average size manufacturer’s cut.
In sum, manufacturers are cutting to the mean of consumers buying clothes. It’s not due to vanity sizing that if your dimensions haven’t changed in 20 years, you’re buying two sizes smaller than you did then. The issue is that the average, the mean today, is two sizes larger than we were 20 years ago. The solutions are to:
1. Get your kids on a diet.
2. All of us older folks buy a lot more clothes.
3. Buy more expensive clothes. Wealthy people are thinner. If designer and bridge lines didn’t size to their core customer, they’d be out of business. I guarantee a RL purple label size 10 is two sizes smaller than a size 10 at the Gap.
By all accounts, manufacturers are doing a poor job of meeting consumers needs, so why would they go to the bother of catering to your self-esteem? I’m telling you, it doesn’t even register. They worry more about a retailer who returns their goods (a “chargeback”) because their sizing hasn’t evolved with the other size 10s on the rack and is in effect, two sizes smaller. While “vanity sizing” annoys consumers, they expect size 10s from the range of manufacturers at the store to be roughly commensurate.
July 9th, 2008 at 1:51 pm
Thanks for your illuminating comments! –BetsyG
August 13th, 2008 at 12:14 am
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February 9th, 2009 at 9:59 am
The British Standards Institute has drafted a solution to this problem. These labels, described under BS-EN13402, have a pictogram with actual measurements in centimeters. Work began in 1996, and was ready for publication in 2003. Seven years from concept to something workable? After reading about the new standard, I thought it would be up and running in a few months, even weeks. Two aspects about the new labels are no-brainers: The pictogram, to deal with the multitude of languages, and the use of metric units, used by 95% of the world’s population. I think the biggest obstacle is that, for the new labels to work, we would need to face anatomical facts. A person who weighs more than is desired would not want her measurements staring in her face, especially if the measurements are in centimeters (we would not even think about them in millimeters, as engineers prefer). Vanity-sized labels gloss over obesity, but BS-EN13402 spells it out. According to a recent unnamed survey, 60% of women do not know their own measurements, another obstacle to the new labels’ acceptance.