wombat1138 (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
wombat1138) wrote2006-04-12 04:52 am
wombat1138) wrote2006-04-12 04:52 am
Entry tags:
Vanity sizing...
...myth or menace? (This post is brought to you by a recent discussion chez ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
kagedreams.)
This blog entry was written by a woman who's a professional pattern-drafter for the clothing industry, and as such, she has an interesting take on the issue which has me going back and forth between "Hmm, okay" and "But how does that differ from the usual explanation?"
For the benefit of mystified (probably male) readers, imagine going out to buy a pair of pants. Women's pants aren't sized with a simple pair of waist/inseam measurements, but rather with a semi-arbitrary size number. However, it's often been observed that, compared to low-end clothing, higher-end clothing seems to have smaller numbers attached to the same dimensions. The term "vanity sizing" has sometimes been applied to this, along with the conclusion that essentially, the manufacturers are using the size numbers as a marketing tool, enticing women to pay more for the illusion of being thinner because of the smaller nominal size.
Her argument is that while the disparity in sizing does exist, it's driven from the other side of the market: designers/manufacturers are normalizing their size ranges to accommodate their target demographic. If the average Liz Claiborne customer has a significantly different shape from the average K-Mart customer, then the middle of each range (8, 10, and 12, I suppose?) will likewise be significantly different. However, I don't think this entirely makes sense; she has a post elsewhere in her blog that there's a negative weight/income correlation for white women (though not black women), so shouldn't a bargain-brand size 10 be larger than a designer/boutique 10 rather than the other way around? Or maybe I'm just hopelessly confused. I suspect this is one of those things where it made sense while I was reading it, but then it fell out the back of my brain cell immediately afterward.
I think I'm more convinced by her discussion of "size creep", the gradual shifting of average dimensions in a given size over the past few decades: on the average, people have been getting larger, bumping up the dimensions of a size 10 (again, primarily due to manufacturing/demographic considerations rather than marketing); the alternative would be to keep each size's dimensions constant but keep adding numbers to the top of the scale, except that messes up the usual logistics calculations somehow. So as smaller people get left behind on the tail end of the bell curve, their size numbers wither away down to 0. (I heard a mention recently of negative sizes. I hope it was a joke.)
This is why I tend to shop for clothing whose sizes are mostly chunked into small/medium/large, although now that I've gotten used to seeing XS bumped up beyond XXS, I'm expecting to see XXXS labels show up any day now. Also, I am resigned to wearing clothes that don't fit particularly well because I just don't frickin' care enough to go through the trouble of getting them right. As long as my shoes don't hurt and I can move everything else without losing circulation or tripping over my hem, yay.
kagedreams.)This blog entry was written by a woman who's a professional pattern-drafter for the clothing industry, and as such, she has an interesting take on the issue which has me going back and forth between "Hmm, okay" and "But how does that differ from the usual explanation?"
For the benefit of mystified (probably male) readers, imagine going out to buy a pair of pants. Women's pants aren't sized with a simple pair of waist/inseam measurements, but rather with a semi-arbitrary size number. However, it's often been observed that, compared to low-end clothing, higher-end clothing seems to have smaller numbers attached to the same dimensions. The term "vanity sizing" has sometimes been applied to this, along with the conclusion that essentially, the manufacturers are using the size numbers as a marketing tool, enticing women to pay more for the illusion of being thinner because of the smaller nominal size.
Her argument is that while the disparity in sizing does exist, it's driven from the other side of the market: designers/manufacturers are normalizing their size ranges to accommodate their target demographic. If the average Liz Claiborne customer has a significantly different shape from the average K-Mart customer, then the middle of each range (8, 10, and 12, I suppose?) will likewise be significantly different. However, I don't think this entirely makes sense; she has a post elsewhere in her blog that there's a negative weight/income correlation for white women (though not black women), so shouldn't a bargain-brand size 10 be larger than a designer/boutique 10 rather than the other way around? Or maybe I'm just hopelessly confused. I suspect this is one of those things where it made sense while I was reading it, but then it fell out the back of my brain cell immediately afterward.
I think I'm more convinced by her discussion of "size creep", the gradual shifting of average dimensions in a given size over the past few decades: on the average, people have been getting larger, bumping up the dimensions of a size 10 (again, primarily due to manufacturing/demographic considerations rather than marketing); the alternative would be to keep each size's dimensions constant but keep adding numbers to the top of the scale, except that messes up the usual logistics calculations somehow. So as smaller people get left behind on the tail end of the bell curve, their size numbers wither away down to 0. (I heard a mention recently of negative sizes. I hope it was a joke.)
This is why I tend to shop for clothing whose sizes are mostly chunked into small/medium/large, although now that I've gotten used to seeing XS bumped up beyond XXS, I'm expecting to see XXXS labels show up any day now. Also, I am resigned to wearing clothes that don't fit particularly well because I just don't frickin' care enough to go through the trouble of getting them right. As long as my shoes don't hurt and I can move everything else without losing circulation or tripping over my hem, yay.