sizing & superiority: living in a consumerist, pseudo-individual world

answering why shopping sucks + sort of tangent on micro label mania

A few months ago, my English class was discussing how much it sucks to buy jeans, especially for women. And it’s been stewing in my mind ever since, along with the concept of “vanity sizing.” It’s a practice in the clothing industry where they state that a garment is a smaller size than what the cut may be. Say you’re a size 8, and when you’re shopping you see that the clothing you fit is referred to as “small”, when the standard sizing would refer to it as a “medium.” ¹

Ultimately, this concept refers back to catering to what your audience wants rather than what they truly need. According to retailer Tessuti in an article with Fashion Network,

37% customers quote incorrect fit as the reason for making a return. And of those who return their items based on size, 55% say they’re too small and 40% too big. ²

While we have used standard sizing in the past (however short-lived it was) ³, it doesn’t change the fact that now sizing varies so much from retailer to retailer, and even within certain retailers. ⁴ 

I’ve noticed that almost everyone (I suppose this is mainly from the perspective of western culture, as it’s the one I’m most familiar with, but a lot of these ideas carry around the world) has an ideal of being skinny. And we see this represented in vanity sizing. Which might seem odd, considering how historically, being thin meant that you were most likely poor, unable to feed yourself. ⁵

But in the world of today, where the rich are knowingly setting trends and wanting to be “relatable” to the people and where performance of one’s identity is at an all time high, it’s easy to see why. In our digital age, people are desperately striving to be seen as individual. 

Capitalism feeds into that desire. 

If you’ve been on social media lately, specifically in spaces with a lot of young women in them, you’ll notice a trend. There’s always a unique title-of-the-month, a type of “it girl” that you must aspire to (This is going to be very female-oriented because again, that's what I’m most familiar with, and also I think if I were to be in a male-dominated space I would throw up). 

There are a million of these micro labels and aesthetics, of these “coquette girls” “sad girls” “vanilla girls” (which, I’m not sure if you can tell by the name or not, is pretty anti-black, and doesn’t even attempt to hide how much it conforms to eurocentric beauty standards). Rayne Fisher-Quann says, in her essay on micro-individuality , that 

Everyone is jostling for attention in a crowded room, struggling to differentiate themselves within an algorithm that exists to turn their personhood into a commodity, subverting and subverting again and re-subverting and de-subverting until they’re right back in the mainstream. half the people talking about The Culture are criticizing our generational individuality complex; the others are complaining that everything and everyone feels exactly the same.⁶

She uses the metaphor of a chip aisle to show how these aesthetics and groups that we’ve put ourselves in look on a grander scale. In the chip aisle, everything is grabbing your attention, trying to one-up each other. They proclaim “new look! part of a healthy lifestyle! gluten free [nevermind that all chips are gluten free]!”⁷. As you go down the chip aisle you see the trend continue. Despite how capitalism touts itself as the master of innovation, it exacerbates this need of constant reproduction. Overall unhealthy for consumers of all kinds.

In the long term, seeing one’s appearance as a performance, of something one must conform to in order to seem “unique” and “niche” in the same way hundreds of others are being unique, is detrimental. Much of what you need to conform is in conventional beauty — that is, of course and again — very eurocentric. If you don’t follow their standards, to the superficial minds of the online, you’re uninteresting, you’re “normcore.” People are worried about that, being perceived as normal. They conflate it with not being special. A lot of discussions nowadays lack nuance, and few even care enough to dig deeper. They project how much they don't care about something beyond its surface onto their perceptions of others and themselves. 

Circling back to skinny (and also a TDLR): people want to be skinny is for no other reason than the fact that it’s likely been drilled into them since birth, especially women. And while this proverbial drilling can and is often done by the people around them, most of the blame falls upon capitalism. Everyone wants to sell you everything. They want to follow the niche needs of everyone, they’re selling you an idea of what you can be. 

Lastly, I wasn’t sure where to put it, but I definitely wanted to mention it, here is an excerpt from Charlie Squire’s memoir, 

Maybe it’s cultural or just a product of my own fucked up internalities, but it seems that there is a general equation of thinness with brilliance, the oddball Patti Smith or Joni Mitchell, so caught up in the divine urgency of the things they have to say and do that they have no time for mortal habits like food or sleep, instead simply folding their thin legs underneath a typewriter chair, eyes growing bigger as the rest of their faces shrink. And I know that this image holds no material truth, I know that the smartest people I know vary in size and shape. I know that anorexia is all-consuming, there is no time to form cogent thoughts when you are eaten alive by a need to further your own disease. I know that I live through a voyeuristic gaze turned in on myself, living out of my own body so that I can witness it in black and white 35mm film. ⁸

1. “Vanity Sizing: How To Avoid It When Shopping For Clothes”, Size Wise, January 31 2021

2. Halliday Sandra, “Online Fashion Returns Soar As Shoppers Lack Size Info”, Fashion Network, March 13 2018

3. Women’s Measurements For Garment and Pattern Construction, U.S. Department of Agriculture, National Agriculture Library, 1941

4. Eliana Dockterman, “Clothing Sizes: How Vanity Sizing Made Shopping Impossible.” Time

5. Anne Hollander, “When Fat Was In Fashion”, The New York Times, October 23, 1977

6. Rayne Fisher-Quann, “Micro-Individuality”, internet princess, January 20 2023

7. Fisher-Quann, “Micro-Individuality”

8. Charlie Squire, “Reflections On A Starved Decade”, evil female, July 19 2022