What’s in a Size?
When shopping for new clothes brings on a malaise
I’ve been shopping for clothes a lot lately, getting ready for our upcoming travel and the wedding we are going to. Shopping has always been a loaded activity for me. As a young adult I worked as a social worker, earning a salary on the lower end of what my classmates in more lucrative professions made. And like the generations after me, my husband and I both had student loan and credit card debt that limited our buying power, especially with two young kids to raise, who took priority when it came to our discretionary spending. That made shopping for new clothes feel extravagant and I often sat in the dressing room adding up the price tags and figuring out which of the items I found were necessary and would last, since these shopping trips were infrequent.
Later, when my career changed slightly and I had more money to spend on myself, I still spent hours trying on different outfits, often the same outfit in different sizes because it is very difficult to know what size would really fit me. Am I an 8, a 10, a 12? The answer was: it depends. Depends on the clothing article and the maker.
In my recent excursion, looking for an acceptable dress for the upcoming wedding, I decided to try the shops in the upscale touristy town nearby, thinking they would have more options for a formal event. This was a mistake on many fronts. First, it was a holiday weekend so the town was packed. Second, the stores not only had dress prices that rivaled my plane ticket cost, they also rarely carried anything in my size. It seems those average sizes listed in the paragraph above are simply too large to grace the racks of these shops. Now I remember why I rarely go there.
I often sat in the dressing room adding up the price tags and figuring out which of the items I found were necessary and would last
With these experiences shopping, it probably isn’t a surprise that I resent the whole process. The endless trying on of clothes, the sales clerks following you around and checking in while you try things on. (I once had to text my husband to stop the clerk from bringing new items to me in the fitting room as I’d been in there nearly 40 minutes and I was starting to feel trapped!) All of this is reason enough to keep me from the mall, but the biggest deterrent of all is the time I spend looking at myself in the mirror, evaluating the outfit, yes, and criticizing everything I see. I doubt I’m alone in that exercise in self loathing.
Recently, I learned about vanity sizing
And discovered to my dismay that I have not been exceptionally good at my diet (as in the foods I normally eat, not a restrictive regimen imposed to lose weight or maintain a weight my body vehemently disagrees with) and exercise routine to stay within the same size range. Instead the sizes have changed and while I still wear the average size, that size is not what it was when I first started my fashion love/hate relationship.
After several days in a row of looking at myself in a mirror trying to find an outfit that looked good on me, I found myself in another malaise thinking about how skinny and pretty I remember being. This reminds me of a quote from Marcus Aurelius that seems particularly apt: “The soul becomes dyed with the color of its thoughts.”
The biggest deterrent of all is the time I spend looking at myself in the mirror, evaluating the outfit, yes, and criticizing everything I see
I guess all that work I’ve been doing in the last year to learn how to coach others through this kind of thinking has not settled my critical brain; like much of my wardrobe, my thoughts are still dyed with dark colors. Maybe though, this is simply a reminder that breaking through the inescapable social messaging of what an attractive female looks like in the US is a difficult and complex skill to master, and it needs constant maintenance to get right.
What is the average size of a woman?
With that in mind, I thought about how I felt after shopping and wondered, what is average in the US and where am I on the continuum? I found the CDC National Center for Health Statistics site and took a look.
Average Size for US Women:
Height in inches 63.5 (5ft 2.9 in)
Weight in pounds: 170.8
Waist circumference in inches: 38.7
Realizing that these averages are very broad measures, it is still interesting to ponder them. As I look at them and see that I am well above average in height, below average in weight and waist circumference I tell myself: I’m good right? Probably, but my critical mind wants more.
That’s when I investigated vanity sizing versus the post World War II sizing that I remember as a girl and young adult. Frances A. Chiu, Ph.D. | writing coach | editor does a nice examination of this in her article on Medium: Honey, I Shrunk the Women’s Sizes!
There she found not only the measurements current retail establishments use for their sizing, but sewing patterns from the 1960–70s that demonstrate that what was an average size of 8, 10, or 12 in the past is now about 2 sizes smaller than those numbers, and now we have 0, 00, and 000 for sizes I would have called petite in the past.
A word about petite: I’ve seen clothing in some stores labeled as petite, and in a size 14, 16, or larger. Petite then, seems to mean a shorter length, not a slight build as I recall it meaning in the past. Is that too, part of the changes due to vanity sizing? I’m not sure.
Back to my critical brain
Does this investigation mollify it, or give it new ammunition to continue criticizing? I bet you can answer that. If once upon a time, my brain reasons, I was a size 8 and now I’m more along the lines of a 12, it does not mean that I have simply filled out as an adult and maybe added a bit after having two kids, it means that I am now what would have been a size 14 or maybe 16 — a size my young self, full of unrealistic and unobtainable beauty standards would have been appalled with.
After several days in a row of looking at myself in a mirror trying to find an outfit that looked good on me, I found myself in another malaise thinking about how skinny and pretty I remember being
Does it mean I am unhealthy? Not according to my doctor, whom I just saw a few months ago. She tells me my weight is fine and generally I am healthy with a creeping up blood pressure reading and cholesterol level. Not completely unexpected at 60 years of age, but worth keeping an eye on. So I continue to go for walks with the dog, swim at the city pool, and work in some calisthenics and mild strength training to feel strong and keep those problems we see with age at bay as best I can.
Does my mind tell me to push myself to get back to that magical “younger me” weight? Of course. I don’t think I will ever completely corral my mind on that one, especially with so much in the media out there on the impossible standards women must try to meet. I’ll never be that young woman that people thought was a model again, no matter how much weight I lose.
But I can remember her fondly, knowing she is part of my experience, part of me still, and we both deserve compassion for trying to meet those unobtainable expectations society put on us. Only now I can decide what, if any, of those expectations I am willing to meet. I bet you can guess how many that will be.
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