Sizing in women’s clothing is broken, and men have no idea.
Unlike in most industries, women’s fashion is extremely exclusive in who companies choose as their target audiences. The sizes of women’s clothes are based more on marketing and the strange desires of male fashion designers than the actual sizes of women’s bodies.
As a man, I’m confident that I can go into almost any clothing store and find something that will fit me. My body, like most men’s bodies, doesn’t have the curves that many women have, so sizing for me is not much of an issue. I assumed that with the plethora of women’s clothing brands, women would have no problem finding clothes that fit them. I was dead wrong.
I didn’t realize my ignorance until a classmate led me on a rabbit hole that opened my mind to a problem I never thought existed. It all started with a brand women know for all the wrong reasons, Brandy Melville.
Brandy Melville is a women’s clothing brand headquartered in Los Angeles that can be used as an example of everything wrong with women’s clothing.
Brandy Melville checks all the boxes: racism, classism, and most prominently, size discrimination.
Ex-Brandy Melville store owner Franco Sorgi said in a Business insider article that the company’s CEO made it clear that he did not want Black people to shop at the brand. Marsan told him that overweight or Black customers would ruin the brand’s reputation, Sorgi told Insider.
Additionally, out of the 53 photos of models on the homepage of the Brandy Melville website, not a single one appeared to be any other race than white.
Sorgi also told the insider that Marson wanted “good-looking rich little girls” to be the target audience of the store Sorgi opened, which is an obviously disgusting statement on a couple different levels.
First, the statement implies that not only does the brand discriminate against Black people but also against people who aren’t “rich” and, most of all, against the body sizes of most women.
The biggest issue with Brandy Melville is its sizing or lack thereof. Brandy Melville sells every one of its garments under one size unique to that garment. The largest garment found on the website was a women’s small/medium, which is already an arbitrary size as qualitative sizes vary tremendously from brand to brand.
At this point, I wanted to know what this store was like in person so I went to the Brandy Melville in Glendale. Upon entering, I was struck by how ridiculously small all of the clothes in the store were. The clothes looked like they would be better off in a Gap Kids than a store marketed toward teenage girls.
On top of that, every piece of clothing was marked with the same “one size” tag with no actual numeric measurements included. I knew at this point I needed to ask someone why a brand would be so insanely selective with their market?
Citrus Anthropology Professor Jennifer Miller-Thayer says that brands like Brandy Melville are not isolated in their practices of only selling clothes to certain sizes.
Miller-Thayer said in an interview that women walk into a store and immediately know nothing will fit them “all the time.”
Miller-Thayer said women are taught that their worth is dependent on their body from when they are little girls, but the fashion industry starts more aggressively using toxic marketing tactics against women when they hit puberty.
When a girl goes through puberty and her body undergoes changes, her proportions uniquely change and imminently the amount of clothes a teenage girl has to choose from shrinks. This happens because women’s clothing is built on a sizing chart developed for one body type when women’s bodies come in an unmeasurable array of different shapes and sizes.
Miller-Thayer said the reason women’s clothing is so exclusive in size is because women’s fashion brands associate who wears their clothes with the quality of their brand.
A woman’s worth in Western culture is based on the misogynistic belief that if a woman doesn’t fit into the narrow beauty standard of the Western world she is not worth as much in a society. So women’s clothing brands want to be associated with those who are worth more in Western culture.
That’s why Brandy Melville only sells clothes in one size. They only want one size of women to wear their clothes.
This practice destroys the self-esteem of the women who don’t fit into those clothes because it sends the message that they are not wanted by the brands meant to make them feel beautiful.
Citrus College psychology major Leyland Pacheco, the student who originally sent me down this rabbit hole, said in an interview that brands like Brandy Melville contributed to her developing an eating disorder and body dysmorphia, from which she has since recovered.
For her, walking into a Brandy Melville store would immediately make her feel “suffocated” and out of place.
“I have a more muscular build than the Brandy Melville girls models because I was a gymnast and a runner, and so I tried the shorts on and they don’t fit and I’m like, ‘fuck, like, OK, something’s wrong with me,’” Pacheco said.
She said going into a Brandy Melville store will make someone go home and look in the mirror and see problems with their body that aren’t there. Walking into a store as a young girl and not fitting into anything sends the message that there must be something wrong with the shopper’s body, so they’ll see problems even when there aren’t any. This is what can lead to somebody developing body dysmorphia, which can lead to things like bulimia and anorexia.
In reality, there is nothing wrong with women’s bodies, just the clothes produced by problematic brands.
Pacheco said when she was experiencing body image issues, she would use the fact that she could fit into Brandy Melville clothes to reward herself for being smaller.
“It’s a sick psychological thing” Pacheco said “‘Oh, I can fit into this. I’m going to buy it to prove to myself that I’m small enough and therefore good enough for people.”
This problem is compounded by the fact that most fashion designers are men.
An article by McKinsey & Company says that less than half of well-known womens wear brands are designed by women, and only 14 percent of major brands are managed by women.
This heightens the disconnect between women’s clothing brands and the bodies those clothes are actually supposed to be worn by.
After learning this lesson the easy way, as a man from the outside, I wanted to see if I was alone in not experiencing these issues.
I interviewed Citrus College students and couple Sonny Arroyo and Blanca Carrasco together to see their experiences shopping for clothes. I wanted to see if their experiences were different with Arroyo being a man and Carrasco being a woman.
While Arroyo said he never walks into a store and thinks he won’t be able to find clothes that fit him, he also said he very rarely shops for clothes to begin with.
Carrasco’s experience was different. Although Carrasco said she shops for clothes nearly every day, she still finds it hard to find clothes that fit her. And said she avoids stores like Tillys and Brandy Melville for that reason.
Carrasco said she believes the reason it’s hard for her to find clothes is that “proportions are a little different.”
After hearing Carrasco’s reasoning, it reminded me of Pacheco saying she felt her body was the problem and not the clothes. I don’t believe this is the case. It should not be women’s responsibility to change their bodies to fit into the clothes they like. It should be the clothing brands’ responsibility to make clothes that fit women’s bodies.
