PLUS SIZE PROPAGANDA
By Kailee Meyer
Money burns a hole in your pocket when you’re a 17 year old girl who can never have enough clothes to wear. Naturally, in the mall the first place you rush into is your favorite store. Your eyes dart back and forth between the walls and racks of clothing you’re dying to own like some sort of awake stage of R.E.M. Dragging a dainty hand through the aisles across the myriad of fabrics and options, you have no idea what to pick up first. Before you move and get submerged in another 10 racks of what’s in season, you casually bump into me, walking my size 16 skinny jeans to the supposed plus size section all the way in the back of the store. The small area of clothing takes up as much space as my bathroom, and the printed blouse I saw at the entrance hanging off a slender model isn't sold in my size. I guess they must have ran out of fabric.
The new phenomena (epidemic possibly) of body shaming in fashion and feminism go hand in hand. Stores such as American Apparel, who have a “no ugly” for retail floor employees policy, sends an ugly message. This makes for a controversial couple when you enjoin it with stores that are known for their substantially small models and clothing. These stores whose demographics compile of sizes extra small to large (0-10) only make up a part of the young ladies walking around malls today. It’s not a problem that they sell this clothing; but girls who are not a size 5 have limited places to shop.
At this stop on the timeline of my generation’s evolution, we see there are just as many thick young women strutting around as thinner girls, yet not enough stores to balance the scale (pun intended). There is a lack of clothing stores to fit the ample amounts of varying body types. It’s extremely frustrating, in my experience, that out of the many stores in the mall, I can truly shop at four of them. By truly I mean buying clothes true to my size, opposed to buying two sizes too big or stretching the small version of a store’s far fetched idea of what large means.
A lot of shops that proclaim to be plus sized aren’t always trendy. There is the grandma-wearing moo-moo plus size or the current hit-or-miss plus size. If you don’t want to look 3 times your age, stores like Torrid or Forever21 can come to the rescue. Forever21 usually never fails; there’s an outfit for most styles and occasions. Stores like Torrid consist of an edgier style with a girl power touch, and, sometimes, can all look the same. Although my closet is equally strewn about with clothing from both stores, I need OPTIONS.
The definition of “options” does not mean a few racks in the whole store with a few XLs on the end. It does not mean the store’s last size available that just so happens to fit me (thank you Old Navy). I need more than one clothing store catering to my body type. Simple as that. Even our World Wide Web has only a few places online with cute clothing for a thicker waistline:
Modcloth: if you’re looking for an antique, simple but elegant style
ASOS: whose curvy section works for every occasion
The question isn’t if I can find my size in any store I walk into; it’s the fact that I want more than one place to offer it to me. I’m a fickle girl and a fickle girl needs options.
The whimsical utopian society where every girl can pull the tag off of a “one size fits all” outfit she just bought DOES NOT exist. All bodies are beautiful but all bodies are different. The difference is that I want just as much availability to to dress nice as any other.
“Beauty and feminism are ageless and can’t be contrived, and glamour cannot be manufactured.” --Marilyn Monroe
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