Friday, June 16, 2006

Size Zero Petite

As I mentioned before, I am a skinny little bitch. I am a petite size zero. I am 5 feet 2.5 inches tall and I weigh about 100 pounds. This makes shopping hellish. Back in the day, I used to be a size 2. But sizes slowly started to get larger. And larger. Now a size 2 appears to be comparable to size 6 of ten years ago. I have slowly been pushed back to a size 0. Size 0 did not used to exist but thanks to the efforts of clothing marketers to convince people that they are not gaining weight but are indeed still the same size, size 0 was invented to take up the slack for the poor schmucks who actually were a size 2. I don't fit into most size zeros as they have started to make size zeros larger also. For example, Anne Taylor Size 0 is not a true size 0 - it's for the "womanly" woman in their 30s who still harbors delusions that she can fit in the same clothes she used to wear in her 20s. I would go as far as to say that the Anne Taylor size 0 of today is comparable to the size 4 of yesteryear.

Suffice it to say, my clothing shopping options are limited. Which is good, I guess, because it saves me a lot of money in the shopping capital of the world. However, I cannot seem to get proper work clothes or nice designer clothes as everything in my size is made for women who are 6 feet tall aka models. Even if the stores do cut them down to petite size, the fit doesn't seem to be quite right as the clothes are really fashioned for taller people. All the stores do is hem the sleeves and the pant lengths without tailoring the lines for the smaller customer. So I am somewhat limited to teen stores. See below the list of stores I frequent to find clothes that fit:

Abercrombie & Fitch - Size Double 0 (00)

Banana Republic - Size 0, hit or miss, once in awhile I luck out and fit into something they had cut particularly small

Petite Sophisticates - Size 0 but their clothes are soooo old. It's made for women in their 40s! Get with the program!!!

American Eagle - Size 0

Bebe - Size 0 or Xsmall

Tahari Petites - Size 0

JCrew - Size 0 although their clothes are starting to get bigger again. What's up with that? They are also not consistent with their sizing.

Forever 21 - Size xsmall

Gap - Size 0 or xsmall

H&M - Size 4

But as teens start to get bigger (read obese), size zeros are also magically getting larger. I sincerely wish that designers and clothing manufacturers would abide by a standard clothing size standard so that we could at least figure out where exactly we are on the spectrum without trying five million things on in seventy different stores. There has been a movement to standardize clothing sizes, it hasn't happened yet. The manufacturers are probably thinking of our steadily increasing obese population in America who would never face shopping again once they hit the dead zones of size 14 and over.

At the very least, it would be nice to have sizes designated by inches the way guys have their clothes measured. For example, guys sizes are dependent on the number of inches around the waist and the length of their leg inseam so a size of 30 by 34 is 30 inches around the waist and 34 inches from their crotch to the ground. How amazing would that be if women could just know how big they actually were? Maybe it would force some of these lardos to control their food intake and not be complacent in their ever increasing size 10 proportions.

Luckily, New York City has a mobile population in that New Yorkers actually walk everywhere. I think this at least forces people to exercise. It also helps that the every so slender fashionistas walking around make you feel guilty enough to keep the weight down. Imagine my shock when I saw this report on the large amount of obese people in New York City. Sadly, a lot of these obese people are very poor which leads to them not knowing any better or not being able to afford better foods. Even worse, half (HALF!!!) of New York City children are obese. A friend of mine who is a teacher in a public school in Brooklyn confessed that she has no average sized or thin children in her class. The most svelte child in her class would be considered quite chubby by our standards. I'm thankful that I missed this chubby era by a few years. I had access to the same junkfoods and regularly ate McDonald's everyday when I was young so why is this not happening to my contemporaries and striking the next generation? I'm convinced that the fast food manufacturers added something new to the fast food in the last ten years that they aren't fessing up to.

Regardless, I think these obese people should seriously control their eating habits. I have seen the lardos eat and it wasn't pretty. How could one man eat 3 full size meals and still complain he's hungry and then blame it on genetics? Sorry dude, it has to do with willpower. Millions of people didn't suddenly grow fat overnight due to genetics. If it was genetics, we would have been seeing millions of families be obese for the past century. The numbers don't lie.

I know people get really upset about us "size zeros" because they mistakenly assume that we are all anorexic. We get a lot of grief from our friends and relatives because they think we want to be this small. We don't have stores dedicated to our small size like the Lane Bryants of plus size women. We don't have skinny help support groups and we are constantly teased for our small size. I would give anything to be a normal healthy size 4 or 6 (well, the size 4 or 6 of 10 years ago. Not the current size 4 or 6). In our case, it truly is genetics. I hate that I have to pay for an airplane coach seat that is much bigger than I am and comfortable only to have a huge fat person sit next to me and take up all the extra space that I paid for!!! I hate that I have to pay the same for my clothes which are just scraps of fabric compared to the same clothes in size 14 which take up a great deal more fabric. I subsidize the fat women's clothes!!! I think that the size zeros get the raw deal. We should at least get some compensation for taking up less space, consuming less resources and generally being faster.

Of course, this is never going to happen. We are nation of mostly large people who are getting ever larger. There will be a point when it will cost too much to subsidize the health problems of obese people and companies and government will just drop obese people as it will cost too much to keep up with them. This is already starting to happen. Why do you think our government is now concerned about a nation of obese people? It is costing the government and special interest groups tons of money to pay for treatment for obese diseases like adult onset diabetes. The government and insurance companies are just waiting for the time that they can wash their hands of the whole issue. They will say that they tried, they called attention to the issue and started programs to prevent it but it didn't work. Then they will leave obese people to eat themselves to death. I certainly don't want to keep on paying for obese people to eat themselves to death. I believe in a social welfare net for people who have lost their jobs, families that are in trouble, children who are abandoned or abused, etc. but I don't count obesity as something that should be within that social net. Certainly not to pay for gastric bypass surgeries for people who can't control themselves!

I keep on thinking back to that scene in Monty Python and the Meaning of Life when that tremendously fat man explodes in the restaurant after devouring a giant meal. Maybe if obese people actually exploded from giant meals, people would control what they ate in fear of dying a terrible and dramatic death from overeating.

2 Comments:

Blogger Amy said...

Hey!

I found your post incredibly funny and you have my sympathy. But I have to say, you are positively tall compared to me! I'm 4'10" and 87 pounds. Because of the utter ridiculousness of my average shopping experience, I've been blogging about it here.

I would also add that if we were proportionally taller, we'd be "normal" sized, not anorexic, not even particularly skinny.

And try shopping online. Banana Republic does 00P, Ann Taylor just started 00P/XXSP. Gap does petites too, but I haven't tried them yet. Petite Sophisticates went under about a year ago.

And yes, though we use less cloth to make our clothes, I'm pretty sure it's actually harder to make smaller clothing (think of baby clothes), despite the money saved from fabric.

8/07/2006 1:54 PM  
Blogger Amy said...

I finally came across your post - I love it! If you want some long-winded commiseration about being petite, just stop by Some Small Sense. You have it "easy" since you're a good 4 inches taller than me - very few petite jacket waists hit me where they're supposed to!

I love your rant about larger people taking up "your" space - I would say that sitting on the subway is worse though, since it's public space and there are no designated seats! It is weird though - we didn't ask to be small, and some people didn't ask to be big either.

Try Ann Taylor 00P and Banana Republic 00P. As if saying that you're a "size zero" isn't ridiculous enough! Petite Sophisticate, btw, is long gone now.

I've long been mulling over posting about a topic you brought up - aren't smaller people less resource gobbling (per person) than larger people? Well, sort of....stay tuned on my blog!

9/06/2006 9:13 PM  

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