MY Fashion Threads

There's discussion of something called "vanity sizing"- which is basically changing clothing sizes around so that even though, as a society, we are getting bigger, pants are now labelled in smaller numbers than they would have been in the past, in an effort to get women to buy more clothes. The article seemed to be saying that there has been as drastic a shift in sizing that what was labelled a size x in the fifties would now be labelled a size zero-zero XXXXX today. There was also a comparison of a pair of Gap khakis- both labelled same size- but one from nineteen ninety six and one from two thousand and six. The two thousand and six version of the pants had three more XXXXX inches in the waist than the nineteen ninety six version :zoinks :scared. Apparently women are more likely to buy more clothes if they are labelled with smaller sizes- even if these women know rationally in their heads that their actual size remains the same- buying a pair of pants in a size that is smaller than they usually take gives a boost of self-esteem which makes the women buy more than they would if the same pair of pants was labelled in their regular size :ugh. Considering our image-obsessed society all of this makes perfect sense and I am not surprised to hear it...but seeing it explained so bluntly is nonetheless very unnerving. I know that from a biological perspective humans are bigger than they were even a century ago- and I don't mean just wt. Everything is bigger: ht., wt., bone frame, shoe size, lung capacity, etc. So from that perspective, it makes sense that clothes are so much bigger now than they used to be. However, that doesn't stop me from being freaked out.