Something is up with this mirror.
My skin doesn’t usually look this glowy — it’s normally paler than printer paper.
I furrow my eyebrows, and the prettier version of me in the mirror furrows her eyebrows back.
I crawl onto the edge of the marble sink to take a closer look, running my fingers alongside the lights at the edge of the mirror. So does she.
What the heck? Sure enough, the plastic of the entire mirror is at an angle to slim the bodies of those who look in it.
Well, duh. I’m in a hotel in Las Vegas. Every woman visiting Vegas wants to look slimmer.
… Right?
The woman in the glowing mirror frowns. She hardly looks like me.
As I write this, I can’t help but think about the other times I’ve written about how society forms how we view our bodies.
Once, I wrote a piece for my high school’s journalism publication about vanity sizing in the clothing industry. Through three hours of solo investigation, I visited six different clothing stores in the local mall, trying on a total of 15 pairs of jeans that were all labeled “size 30” — and in the end, only four pairs fit me. One store didn’t even carry a “size 30” because they only carry up to “size 24.” I left feeling like I had been lied to, over and over.
Most clothing stores, especially those that are mainstream enough to appear in malls, don’t bother using actual measurements for their clothing because consumers are scared of the realities of the dimensions of our bodies. Their thoughtless solution is to use arbitrary numbers and subjective words like “large” or “small” to describe the clothing — clothing that is meant to fit us, not the other way around. These labels have only formed a new layer of confusion for shoppers when it is already hard enough to see the truth of our bodies and love and care for them.
But why are we afraid? Why aren’t we appreciative of the bodies that God formed? Which came first: Were we ashamed of our bodies, or did stores create this shame?
I’m still not sure which started the cycle, but I think a main contributor to this vicious cycle is how clothing sizes are seen in stores, both in the modeling of clothes and the layout of the store itself.
I used to work at Maurices, a women’s clothing store aimed towards business-casual wear and clothing for mothers. Oftentimes I’d be put on “takeback duty” when I was working in the fitting room area, which meant organizing clothes that people had tried on but not purchased into four categories — clearance, business, casual, and plus-size. I often found myself wondering, how come the plus-sizes get their own pile? It’s not like we treat any other sizes like that. It didn’t help that the plus-size section was at the back of the store, almost as if it was to be hidden away from the public eye. And oftentimes, our more popular items would not even be stocked in our plus sizes until much later than the “regular” sizes were released. What even is the point of having a separate “plus size” area if all of the numbers on our clothing tags are made up anyway?
My mom wears plus-sized clothing, and she used to shop for clothes with me, but it’s never been an easy process. Almost every time, no matter what she did to make the experience comfortable for me (my mom is a blessing, and she really did try), by the end of a long day in the mall there’d be tears and a fight.
Nowadays I’m not afraid to say that I’m a little heavier than most people my age when it comes to weight, but in middle school and high school, this was an extremely difficult thing to swallow. It’s just how I’m built, no matter what diet my family tries or how much I exercise. But for some reason, many clothing stores think that because someone weighs a little more than average, they don’t care at all about fashion.
I felt this often when I was in middle school, where once every few months I’d find myself standing in an overly humid JCPenney’s arguing with my mom about “dressing for my body type.” I don’t remember each specific instance, but I do remember how hot my cheeks always felt with shame every time something didn’t fit in the fitting room, and how I would just shut down in the store out of embarrassment. My mom would keep prodding me with questions — I am sure she was just trying to help figure out what was wrong, to see if she could help — but all I could do was stand there, silently. I didn’t even cry until later.
Looking back now, I recognize that the problem was I wanted to be perceived as “just like everyone else” through my clothes, which is impossible. I wanted to dress like people my age, but my body didn’t match the “average” of those my age (what even really is that, anyway?) — so anything that fit dimensionally resembled a slightly-out-of-fashion 30-year-old, which didn’t fit my style, and anything that fit my style didn’t fit my body at all.
I wish I had some kind of solution to the damage that society has done to how people look at their bodies. Somehow I feel like the first step is sharing stories about how we feel so that maybe people can feel less ashamed of themselves. But what comes after that? It feels unreasonable to ask people to boycott every clothing store or hotel that uses this mentality — it feels like it’s everywhere. So instead maybe it’s better to make some kind of internal change, but how can we expect people to do that when it feels like everything around us is asking for us to look different and “better” than how we actually are?
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