Clothes sizes are arbitrary and all but meaningless and you do not have to let them affect you in the slightest.
This may sound strange. It may come as a surprise. We’re taught to think of clothes sizes as profoundly significant, deeply meaningful, and incredibly revealing.
There’s the “straight sizes” versus “plus sizes” divide, for instance. If a person fits into the sizes on one side of that line, they’re “normal” sized. If not, they’re “plus sized,” which is another way of saying fat. We tend to attach a lot of stigma to fatness, in our culture, and a lot of approval to being thinner, so being in the “plus sizes” range comes with a giant whack with the low-status stick, while being in the “straight sizes” range means you’ve got some automatic, unearned bonus status points.
There’s also the notion that there’s a sort of magical ideal size a person, particularly a woman, ought to be, and that’s somewhere between a US dress size 6 and a dress size 10. Below a 6 and you’re “petite” or possibly — though it’s not something many people even think of as a real thing — too thin. Above a 10 and you’re veering toward that “plus-size” range that starts, depending on who you ask, somewhere between US dress sizes 12 and 18.
I have, and you probably also have, seen people congratulate themselves on fitting into a particular size of clothing. A common narrative is that the person has intentionally done things to change their body size and now can once again fit into something they used to wear but had outgrown, and they see it as proof of victory.
There’s also that golden oldie of self-loathing where someone speaks with disgust of the larger size clothes they’re sometimes compelled to wear because that’s what fits their body at that moment in time, but speaks with pleasure and pride about the smaller sized ones that fit them at other times, even if it’s the same garment. I mean, in real terms the difference between any two garments that are one clothes size apart is a handful of square inches of cloth distributed over an entire garment, but the way some people talk you’d think it was the difference between being nominated for sainthood and being publicly humiliated on national television.
Because we’ve all been so thoroughly indoctrinated in thinking that fat is bad and thin is good and to understand clothes sizes as indicating degrees of fatness or thinness, all this sort of thing makes a relentless and ridiculous amount of intuitive and emotional sense.
In reality, clothing sizes didn’t exist before the Industrial Revolution started to change how clothes got made. Before there were factories — which looked differently at different times — making clothing in large quantities to be sold ready-made to whoever wished to buy some, there was no need for clothing sizes to exist. When clothing was made directly and specifically for the individual person who would wear it, it was simply made to measure. A coat wasn’t a size 2 or 12 or 22, it was Frances’ coat, and it was the size that fit Frances.
Only when it became necessary to somehow impose a degree of organization on the large numbers of coats, or trousers, or shirts, or undergarments, that a factory was making did it become useful to create categories of size.
This was not an instantaneous process, or a uniform one. There are lots of different ways to create size categories. You can use measurements of various types. You can give an arbitrary name or number to a range of measurements. You can have names or numbers for particular ranges of measurements that are standardized by some industry or government authority. You can simply describe a group of garments based on whether those garments are bigger or smaller than those in a different group, like we do with garments that are sized small/medium/large.
There are many options for how clothes could be grouped by size. In the US, we are resolutely unwilling to pick just one. It’s common for men’s trousers to be sized by measurements, say a 38 waist and a 32 inseam, while women’s trousers are sized by dress sizes, for example, while bra sizes are calculated using a quasi-algebraic equation that involves the measurement around the ribcage below the breasts, plus the number of inches the breast extends past the ribcage whilst a bra is being worn, requiring a sort of boob-lifting-device Inception situation where you have to know what size bra you wear in order to measure yourself correctly to determine your bra size.
So tell me again why it is that we so often seem to decide it’s sensible to yoke our self-esteem, our feelings about our bodies, our ability to be accepting or approving of our own physical selves to the numbers that someone else has decided to attach to the garments we wear? They’re arbitrary. They’re meaningful only insofar as they’re relative to other numbers used in the same system.
Even the systems themselves are idiosyncratic. Unlike in some other places, in the USA there is no obligatory sizing standard. Men’s clothing manufacturers often use a sizing system based roughly on inch measurements, particularly for trousers, jackets, and dress shirts. But not always. In casual clothing, like T-shirts and athletic wear, a set of small / medium / large / extra large (etc.) categories is typical, but what each of those actually indicates, in terms of the measurable dimensions of the garments, varies from manufacturer to manufacturer and sometimes even between different product lines or product types produced by a single maker.
By contrast to women’s wear, this is rule-following to the point of being nearly hidebound. Women’s wear sizing is pretty much a free-for-all. There have been various attempts to impose a sizing standard in women’s clothing in the US, the most serious of them in 1958, but none of them ever really got much traction. Women’s clothes manufacturers, honestly, don’t seem to feel the need. Over time, the body measurements reflected in so-called “industry standard” sizing have gotten larger.
At the same time, the practice of “vanity sizing” has taken hold especially among luxury brands, where the number on the size label is deliberately considerably smaller than the measurements of the garment might otherwise imply, the better to flatter the self-image of the shopper with money to spend.
Some clothes makers, realizing that sizes are arbitrary and they could call them anything they wanted, have done exactly that, and made up their own names for their own sizing ranges. I enjoy this creative take by athletic gear maker Superfit Hero, for instance.
In other words, the number on the size label of the clothes you fit into has less to do with your actual body size, regardless of what your body size might be, than you probably think it does.
It has a lot more to do with the manufacturer that made the clothes, and what their priorities are in multiple areas — including, perhaps, the desire to flatter those who are caught up in the belief that a smaller size is so inherently superior that they’ll pay premium prices for the size tag sewn into a garment to tell them what they want to hear.
As a fat woman, I don’t have the option of shopping from some of the luxury brands that are most notorious for vanity sizing. (I probably wouldn’t even if I could fit into their clothes, to be honest, simply because I couldn’t afford them.) But my wardrobe still makes a fantastic example of just how totally, absurdly, completely, ridiculously arbitrary clothing sizes are.
Here’s a picture of me that I took just now, on this rainy afternoon, in my home office, using the webcam on my computer. Don’t mind the dog bed or the haphazardly shoved-aside desk chair, they’re not the point.
The point is that here I am, a fat middle-aged woman, and the sizes given on the labels of the garments I am wearing in this picture are as follows:
Cardigan: XL
Tank top: 2XL
Skirt: 5XL
Tights: D
See what I mean? Which of these sizes, if any, is a reflection of me? Are any of them something I should be taking into consideration, if I’m going to base how I feel about myself on the size of something I wear? Should I feel super-duper shitty about myself on the basis of that 5XL, or fairly good on the basis of that XL? Should I average it out and decide to only hate myself moderately on the basis of the 2XL? Is the D like a letter grade in school, one step away from total failure, or is it merely four letters in to a 26-letter alphabet?
How, I ask you, how is a girl to decide how much to hate her body on the basis of her clothes size if the damn size tags won’t even give her a consistent answer?
On this score, I offer this modest suggestion: bypass the whole sorry affair and become numberless.
One of the little luxuries I have given myself, over the past handful of years, has been ordering some of my dresses from eShakti.com, a clothes manufacturer that offers the unusual and welcome option of entering your measurements and having your clothes literally made to measure. When you order clothes from them on that basis, they arrive not with a size label, but with a tag that simply reads “custom.”
Unless you make your own clothes, which is something I’m trying to do more of, it’s become very rare to have a garment made to measure. More to the point, it’s almost unheard-of to have items in your closet that literally do not tell you what size their manufacturer thinks they are, or that you are.
Let me tell you a secret: it’s pretty great.
It’s a real pleasure to be able to select a garment on the basis of whether it feels good on your body and suits what you want to be wearing that day, in that season, in that weather, without the slightest thought to what size it is. Or what size it isn’t.
I like being able to choose what I wear depending on how I want to feel in my clothes that day, what kind of fit I’m interested in sporting, and whether I’m up for feeling things feeling snug on whatever part or parts of my body or whether I’m really only in the mood for that kaftan lifestyle, all without giving one single sub-microscopic goddamn what size the label inside proclaims the clothing to be.
Go ye forth, my friends, and become numberless. You don’t have to buy custom-made clothes to do it, either. All you have to do is grab some scissors and cut the size labels out of your clothes.
If they can’t be cut out, take your favorite big fat black magic marker and pretend you’re redacting the everloving hell out of some seriously incriminating Trump White House pharmacy records. If that won’t work, a dab of fabric paint is cheap and effective and you can get any color you like. You could always embroider over the size tag, if you liked, or sew a cute patch over it. I have ambitions of going through my t-shirts one of these days and sewing little patches over the size markings, with pictures of pomegranates and hedgehogs and dahlias and corgis.
No matter what you do, it’s bound to be better than letting a closet full of basically imaginary little numbers that exist solely for the convenience of the clothes manufacturer have the power to make you feel any kind of way about yourself. Nothing that utterly arbitrary and chaotic should be able to make you feel bad about yourself. Or, for that matter, good.
You have better things to do with your life than be gaslit like that, my friend. The choice is entirely yours.
The revelation that I had years ago after my first long sojourn in India, that all my clothes just...fit...led to my thinking about kurta pajamas and then to saris, the ultimate custom fit all the time clothes. (Even choli blouses are made custom and with extra seam allowance so they can be let out easily). This most recent trip i had five salwaar suits made to order from pre embroidered fabric and it was glorious. Meanwhile I wore saris the whole trip. It is infuriating that clothes are telling people that their bodies are somehow wrong, and that should never be a thing.