5
May
2006
11:15 Pacific Daylight Time
Fooling Half the People, All the Time
I have long complained of the idiocy of women's clothing sizes. Whereas men's pants have numbers with units associated with them (waist and inseam in inches), women's apparel come in these arbitrary units that go down to zero, and even below. I don't understand how "zero" can be a size, since by definition it is nothing, but such is the logic behind female fashion. It would be bad enough having to find clothes based on dimensionless numbers even if those numbers were consistent, but in fact a size 4 is not the same from store-to-store, or even year-to-year. Just as grades have been inflated in the past few decades, so that a "C" now means "borderline retarded" instead of "average," women's clothing sizes have shrunk so that someone who used to wear a size 8 might now find size 0 too large for her. That was the case for Wendy Chao, in an article in the Boston Globe that I found on fark.
Chao was already mystified by how she'd shrunk from a size 8 in high school to a size 2 today, despite gaining 15 pounds in the interim. But now at size 0, she realized something curious was afoot.
"As far as I can see, size means nothing," she said. "I am different sizes at different stores, but they're all remarkably smaller than what I wore as a scrawny teenager. In my closet, I have everything from a size 0 to a size 12." She added that a size 8 skirt she bought from Ann Taylor in 2000 is "identical in cut" to the size 0 she bought at the store late last year.
The article refers to this deceptive practice as "vanity sizing," something that would only ever work on women or gay men. The fast food industry has also tried using misleading sizes. Everyone knows the three default sizes for anything are small, medium, and large. But at most hamburger joints, it's large, extra-large, and "Biggie," "Grande," or something similar. To be fair, the smallest servings available today are probably bigger than the large servings of twenty years ago, but the labeling is still intended to fool the customer. Just like every item that costs $19.99 is really $20, and a gallon of gas that is $3.099 is really $3.10. The difference is that $19.99 and $3.099 are both real numbers, which allows a mechanism to correct for any marketing propaganda. Even food items can be easily quantified. You could count the number of French fries in a combo-meal, or weigh the burger. But clothing? Women's clothing? I wouldn't try making any measurements unless I were a tailor.
And for all you fellow conspiracy-theorist out there? Here's a teaser:
The problem has only become more acute since January 1983 when the US Department of Commerce dropped a uniform sizing system for women on the grounds that it no longer reflected the size and shape of the average consumer.
So there used to be a uniform sizing system until 1983. It may have been dimensionless, but at least it was uniform. And what did they do? Rather than fix the system by attaching units to those dimensionless sizes, they just scrapped the system altogether. What do you think are the odds that that decision was made after someone got a fat campaign contribution? I'll bet the first retailers to start changing their sizes got some hefty sales boosts.