I am not a small person. The older I get, the more I accept the unchangeable fact of my 5'10" frame and its unwavering 155 pounds. My body is a pear-shaped legacy from my mother’s side of the family. And while I’m an inch or two and a few pounds shy of being described as Amazonian, I haven’t slipped into a single-digit dress size since I was fifteen.
So, imagine my initial delight when, while shopping for a dress to wear to a wedding, I was swimming in size tens. I traded in the tens for eights that were still too big. It didn’t seem possible that I was a size six, but I pulled some size-six dresses off the rack and prepared for zipper battles. Instead, I fit neatly in the dresses, just the way I’d normally fit into a ten. I braved a look at myself in the mirror under those horrid fluorescent lights; surely if I’d dropped two dress sizes, I would notice it in the leanness of my thighs and the flatness of my belly. But I looked exactly as I always have.
Part of me wanted to do a little squealing and clapping, but my dominant skepticism put down such naive and girlish notions. Something was afoot—I could feel it.
The Origins
Vanity sizing is when individual retailers make their own determinations about what combination of measurements determines a specific size. Some argue that this practice happens because American women are more obsessed with size than ever. And the fashion industry, obligingly and with creative fluidity, has invented a lawless nonsystem in which a size eight becomes a size two, or only sizes zero through three are offered, or other such tactics.
The Civil War necessitated the swift tailoring of uniforms for hundreds of thousands of soldiers, thereby establishing a standard of sizes for men, which has since informed all systems of measurement for the male physique. But while men have the Civil War to thank for establishing standardized sizing charts, women had to wait seventy years until they were at the mercy of the mail-order business, which took off in the 1940s. It wasn’t until the demand for ready-to-wear garments and the convenience of mail-ordering them increased that anyone thought to standardize women’s sizes based on average measurements. Even then, that effort came out of the gate ripe with subjectivity. It wasn’t long before clothiers were calling their own shots as to what size went with what combination of bust-waist-hips measurements.
That was the last time anyone attempted to create size standards for women’s clothing; suffice to say, women have changed a lot in size and shape since the 1940s, as have our attitudes about our size and shape. Hence, vanity sizing has become an institution of sorts.
