Fashion – Page 4 – Feministe

Standardizing Sizing

In one store, you’re a Size 4, in another a Size 8, and in another a Size 10 — all without gaining an ounce.

It’s a familiar problem for many women, as standard sizing has never been very standard, ever since custom clothing gave way to ready-to-wear.

So, baffled women carry armfuls of the same garment in different sizes into the dressing room. They order several sizes of the same shirt online, just to get the right fit.

Now, a handful of companies are tackling the problem of sizes that are unreliable. Some are pushing more informative labels. Some are designing multiple versions of a garment to fit different body shapes. And one is offering full-body scans at shopping malls, telling a shopper what sizes she should try among the various brands.

This is such a frustrating problem for women of all sizes. I understand the purpose of vanity sizing — if someone who is usually a size 6 fits into a size 2, she’s perhaps more likely to purchase that garment. And I’ve certainly hesitated to size up because the number seemed too high. But vanity sizing makes size tags virtually meaningless, and makes shopping much more challenging (especially if you don’t want to spend an hour trying on clothes at the store, or if you prefer to shop online):

Take a woman with a 27-inch waist. In Marc Jacobs’s high-end line, she is between an 8 and a 10. At Chico’s, she is a triple 0. And that does not consider whether the garment fits in the hips and bust. (Let’s not get into length; there is a reason most neighborhood dry cleaners also offer tailoring.)

There’s a class aspect to this as well. Higher-end brands, I’ve noticed, are sized much smaller than middle-market and mall-store clothes. The cuts, too, are different — mall-store brands like Ann Taylor, Banana Republic and J Crew are not only wildly over-sized as a general rule (especially Ann Taylor, sweet Jesus), but also cut wider in the waist. I am by no means a tiny person, but I don’t even attempt to go shopping at the Gap (or a lot of similar national stores) anymore, unless it’s for an over-sized sweater, because I’m going to waste my time trying on a million different ill-fitting items. Talking about this stuff can feel a little bit whine-braggy (“Ugh don’t you hate it when you don’t even fit into a size zero?”), but really, tiny sizes should fit tiny people (and I am not in their ranks). At the same time, a lot of these stores don’t advertise or adequately stock plus-sized clothes, so larger women aren’t going to walk in, either. And as the Times article details, pants that fit my short legs and big butt and thick thighs and smaller waist are not going to fit my friend’s long skinny legs and straight waist; so why are we both trying on the same size and the same cut?

Stores should be able to cater to larger people by adding additional sizes, not just by cutting garments larger and calling them size 10. It goes back, in part, to how size is tied not only to perceptions of attractiveness but also to social class. Carrying sizes in the 16+ range can add to the perception that a store is down-market; if the store is Chico’s then it’s no biggie, but if it’s J. Crew, that’s going to be a marketing problem. Instead of offering sizes for a wide range of bodies, stores will cut a size 14 to fit a size 20 so they don’t lose the larger customer (and in turn, the size 8 customer fits into a size 2 and feels great and buys more clothes). But stores also can’t afford to lose their smaller customers, so Size 2 items in a particular store have wildly different measurements. The small (but not too small) woman can usually find something and the large (but not too large) woman can usually find something too, but neither of them can walk in to any given store and grab their size and be reasonably confident it will fit.

And despite vanity-sizing and cutting clothes larger and larger, women who are size 20 plus (and there are a lot of women who are size 20 plus) are generally out of luck when it comes to shopping at stores that don’t advertise themselves as “plus-sized.” And since there are so few plus-sized stores, there are not only fewer options generally, but far fewer choices when it comes to cut — and a pear-shaped size 24 is going to fit clothes very differently than a size 24 who carries her weight at her waist. At least if you’re a size 6 (even if that means your clothing tags list sizes that range from 2 to 10) you can try on 15 different pairs of pants at 6 different stores; if you’re a size 20-something, you’ve got Lane Bryant and maybe one or two others.

It would be nice if women’s clothes, like men’s, were sized in inches and were fairly standard; it would also be nice if so much value weren’t assigned to the size on your pants tag.

In honour of the wonderful Elly Jackson

It was recently Elly Jackson’s 23rd birthday, so I thought we ought to celebrate! (But, uh, ran a little late, apparently!) Who is Elly Jackson, you ask? She’s half of British electro-pop band La Roux, who won this year’s Grammy for best electronic/dance album.

She’s also one of my favourite pop stars, because she refuses to play into a mode of femininity that doesn’t fit with her personal gender presentation preferences. She keeps her red hair sticking up, her clothes androgynous, and doesn’t ever smile for photoshoots. It’s wonderful to see a young woman who simply doesn’t care to be like anyone else, who wears the clothes she wants and makes the music she loves. It’s people like Ms Jackson who show that you don’t have to conform to be popular or, more importantly, to be good at what you do. A very happy belated birthday to her.

You have to check out La Roux’s song “Bulletproof,” which may get stuck in your head for a week solid, just to warn you. Embedding is disabled on the video, so click through to see it. Lyrics here. A transcript follows:

We open with lines snaking across a floor covered with geometric objects. There’s a shot of a pair of shoes, and then of their owner, a red-haired woman dressed in an androgynous style, sitting in a white chair with head bowed to her left side. Her head snaps up and she begins to sing. She rises and walks along a (clearly digitally created) room governed by geometric shapes and lines. The colours of the room change as we move into the chorus – and the same for the next verse – and for some shots she is standing still rather than walking. She’s back in the chair for the bridge, then, for an instrumental section, walking along a black pathway in a white room as a lot of geometric shapes hit the floor and bounce, with an explosion-like effect. Another chorus, as she walks along a corridor, the shot fragmented with a broken glass effect so that we can see her wearing bits of different outfits she has been wearing through the video (a black and white one, black clothes with a white jacket featuring coloured patches, a grey ensemble and so forth). Then there are rapidly-switching shots of her in different outfits. We end with her sitting in a chair, the shot zooming out as the lights go out.

Kiddie Couture

French Vogue features its youngest models ever: Kindergartners. They’re fully made up and are striking eyes-cast-down, pouty-lipped poses. And the spread is called “Cadeaux,” which means “gifts.” Um, yuck.

The copy asks, in part, “What makeup at what age? What makeup does one wear at 13? What about at 70? Obviously not like one does at 20.” Styling a spread about choosing the right makeup when you’re 13 or 20 or 70? It makes complete sense to choose models who look like they’re about 9.

In Vogue’s defense, fifth-graders were probably too fat.

Man-Repelling

Maybe I will have something more intelligent to say about this later, but: I appreciate women who are able to have a sense of humor about fashion, and who recognize that for a lot of us, clothing is wearable art and not just a way of making ourselves look attractive (or covering our butts). Maybe I’m just biased because I really like a good jumpsuit (although I’m not such a fan of how hard they are to get off when you have to pee).

Men & Fashion

An Esquire blogger takes issue with Google’s new “Boutiques” shopping site:

Shopping is hard enough as it is. We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again: The reason men don’t get quite as excited about buying clothes as our female counterparts comes down to information — we need options, often easy ones, to make the right decisions. And the Internet doesn’t have a lot of easy options, which is why men aren’t currently going quite as crazy hunting for Black Friday deals, nor do many of us even know what that “Cyber Monday” exists.

Which is also why we got excited to wake up this morning to an e-mail from Google, the Internet’s kingmaker of simplicity in the information overload, about… fashion. Boutiques.com, we were told, “uses computer vision and machine learning technology to visually analyze your taste and match it to items you would like.” Sounds nerdy, but totally brilliant, which is basically why The Times’ Cathy Horyn gave Google’s new e-commerce site the rave review we read on the train this morning.

And then we logged in. Google’s machine learning asks for Your Boutique Preferences, followed by not one but a dozen pictures of…. wait, this is only for women? Now, we understand, ladies love to shop online, and for our half of the species, well, it’s kind of a pain in the ass right now. But as Michael Williams over at A Continuous Lean lamented the other day, guys want to shop online, and there’s a missed opportunity in having fantastically curated clothing sites that are more or less “deliberately designed to repel men.”

A Google spokesman told The Style Blog this morning that the company had “no other specifics to share at this time” beyond its blog-post announcement that right now “Boutiques is only available in the U.S. and only for women’s fashion, but we plan to expand in the future.” Well, men might as well start making their voices be heard. There will be other sites — good ones, without repellants — but this Google thing is going to be a big deal, and it’s going to get better. Tell them you want a whizbang, mind-reading fashion site of your own — or at least a tab on there somewhere. In the meantime, Gilt Man has some nice shirts on sale today.

Maybe I’ve been in New York for too long, but most men I know are interested in fashion, and shop extensively online, and care quite a bit about how they look. I realize Google is operating out of t-shirt-and-flip-flop land in Palo Alto, but this is a pretty big misstep (and missed opportunity). I’ve been playing on Boutiques all morning, and dudes, you are missing out. Rise up!

Next: Hairshirts

The J Crew catalog appears to be featuring models with really hairy legs. Interesting. Too bad they are just the world’s most unfortunate tights.

Why a Trend Piece on Small Breasts Is Problematic

The New York Times had a piece yesterday in their Style section talking about A-cup (or smaller) women. The article was written by Catherine Saint Louis who wrote about teen botox not that long ago. I know body image issues (of which breast size is just a small part) are extremely personal, but I find it more than a little odd that the Times decided to write a trend piece on small-breasted women.

Though certainly nearly every woman is insecure about her breasts at some point in her life (or maybe for nearly all of her life) the idea that small-breasted women are marginalized and need to “take back” the idea that they can be attractive is odd, to say the least. Small-breasted woman are almost universally small in other ways, and it would be hard to say that skinny women are marginalized. As we’ve seen, skinny women are usually held up as the ideal and the standard rather than an anomaly.

Let me first say I completely the understand the struggles of being an unusual size — large or small. I’ve been really lucky (privileged, even) that I have an average bra size and my struggle for buying them is more out of laziness and dislike of lingerie departments than it is over a challenge to find something that fits.

But this article is deeply problematic. The story itself starts with a rather poor assumption: “The parade of heaving bosoms in Victoria’s Secret catalogs not only suggests that bigger is better but also that supersizing with a push-up bra is universally desired.” While the models in Victoria’s Secret catalogs certainly emphasize the models’ breasts more (particularly with Photoshop), it would be false to say that Victoria’s Secret is a store that sells bras for large-breasted women, which is what the “heaving bosoms” description seems to imply. I know women whose breasts were too large for Victoria’s Secret. They, like many other mainstream clothing companies, cater to the masses, which means they have a lot of 34B bras and probably not a lot of the larger and smaller sizes.

To be fair, it is worth pointing out that not all small-breasted women want push-up bras — something I’ve heard small-breasted women complain about. Just because a woman’s breasts are small doesn’t necessarily mean she wants to make them bigger.

Some small-breasted women have complained about their small breast size, referencing the 1972 Esquire article, “A Few Words About Breasts” by Nora Ephron. Others, the article says, are proud of their flat-chested status, evidenced by Facebook groups like “Flat Chested and Proud of It!” and “Flat Chested Girls United.”

It’s great that this article is promoting the acceptance of small breasts, but it would be nice if they did the same for large-breasted women. Instead, the article fails to really address that diversity in women’s bodies includes the DD in addition to the AA. The only acknowledgment of such women in the article is “In recent years, as people’s weight has ballooned, breasts (mostly made up of fat) have only gotten larger, and commensurately bra cup sizes, too. K-cups now exist.”

That’s it. K-cups now exist.

Many will probably also take issue with the link of breast size to weight. While there is a correlation between weight and breast size, large breasts are not necessarily and indicator of “ballooning” weight.

The next line: “Brandishing a tiny bosom may be a reaction to that trend.” Um, reaction? Did breast size suddenly become matter of choice and not something related to your overall body size and genetic makeup (or willingness to undergo plastic surgery?). Women don’t just decide large breasts are so over and they’re going to trade in a D-cup for a AA-cup.

We should be focusing on acceptance of all types of bodies — not just offering a round of applause to women with small breasts.

I don’t mean to imply that the struggles of women with small breasts aren’t valid — they are. I’d just like to see the New York Times take on the issues of women with large breasts — of which there are many — with equal vigor. But I’m not holding my breath.

Glass Slippers

Reshma Saujani is a 34-year-old attorney running against Carolyn Maloney in New York’s 14th Congressional district. She’s a new-comer to politics; she’s Indian-American; she’s socially liberal but pro-Wall Street; and she’s running against a faithful liberal feminist. If elected, Saujani would be the youngest woman in Congress. No one really expects Saujani to win, but it’s still an interesting race.

The narrative surrounding her election, though, has been less about policy and more about a Bright Young Thing vs. The Woman Who Paid Her Dues. The Times coverage this week has been particularly bad. A reporter was apparently assigned to cover the Saujani campaign, and instead of writing about anything substantive, she wrote about Saujani’s shoes.

Reshma Saujani has a lot to say about her bid to challenge Representative Carolyn B. Maloney in the Sept. 14 Democratic primary, and I listened carefully as I accompanied her while she canvassed in Astoria, Queens, on Saturday afternoon.

But as Ms. Saujani, a 34-year-old lawyer, described some of her passions — a public-private partnership to finance start-up costs for worthy entrepreneurs, the passage of the Dream Act for talented illegal immigrants aspiring to college — I found myself increasingly, and in spite of myself, wondering about her shoes.

It’s just downhill from there. The shoes, for the curious, are Kate Spade wedges — wedges typically being more comfortable than heels when you’re walking around all day canvassing, and trying to show a New York Times reporter what it is that you’re doing to get elected.

The reporter does point out that focusing on what a woman wears is sexist; no one ever asks Chuck Schumer about his footwear choices. And women are criticized no matter what they wear — they’re “mannish” if they wear drab suits like their male counterparts, or unfashionable if they wear brighter suits, or elitist and not serious if they’re fashionable (see: Nancy Pelosi, Michelle Obama). Saujani, the reporter points out, risks losing credibility because of her footwear:

Ms. Maloney, who declined to name her footwear of choice, has tried to draw a contrast between her own track record in Congress and Ms. Saujani’s lack of experience in an elected position. Those hip heels run the risk of undercutting Ms. Saujani’s credibility with the people she needs to convince of her gravitas (a wedge issue, even?). It is a concern no man has to consider when choosing loafers or lace-ups.

No, it’s not. And male politicians also don’t typically worry that a Times reporter is going to write about their wardrobe instead of their positions.

Thanks, Jan, for the link.

Toeing the Line

The big new issue facing female lawyers today: Peep-toe shoes.

Yes, the legal blogs are in a tizzy over the question of whether women should or should not wear peep-toe shoes to court, because said shoes may be “provocative.” (To which I say: Better provocative clothing items, please). As is the case whenever women’s work attire is brought up, there is no consensus on what is or isn’t appropriate. Some judges think it’s fine if women wear peep-toe pumps — they wear peep-toes too! Some other judges think it’s inappropriate! Some people on the internet think toes are too sexy to be shown! Some people on the internet think it’s ok to wear peep-toes, but not full-frontal (full frontal!) open-toes! Some people on the internet worked with This One Woman who wore this one Totally Inappropriate Sexy Thing! Some people on the internet think I should make them a sandwich! Other people on the internet think this whole conversation is inane!

…and I am in that last camp. If you are spending hours of your life arguing that women should not wear peep-toe shoes to court or to the office, I would suggest taking up a hobby, or perhaps volunteering somewhere. You will never get those hours of your life back! You could have spent them playing with puppies (I hear the ASPCA does good work), and instead you were debating the relative provocativeness of toenails as compared to toe-cleavage. Because, really, women in the law have bigger issues to worry about than whether another attorney or a juror or a commenter on Above the Law is going to think we’re unprofessional floozies who “risk losing credibility and respect” because our toenail polish is visible.

Bigger issues like, “Can I wear a sleeveless top to the office when it is 105 degrees outside?” (Answer: No. Says the lady in the sleeveless top).

The Essence Thing.

Essence magazine hires Ellianna Placas, a white woman, as their fashion director and the black internet (yes, there’s a black internet) goes nuts:

Placas, who used to work at O: The Oprah Magazine and US Weekly, will apparently make her debut in Essence’s 40th anniversary issue, on newsstands in September. Although Essence has been looking for a fashion director for quite some time, not everyone is happy with their newest acquisition.

Michaela Angela Davis, former fashion editor of Essence and former editor-in-chief of Honey Magazine, revealed on her Facebook Wall, “It’s with a heavy heart I’ve learned Essence Magazine has engaged a white Fashion Director. I love Essence and I love fashion. I hate this news and this feeling. It hurts, literally. The fashion industry has historically been so hostile to black people–especially women. The 1 seat reserved for black women once held by Susan Taylor, Ionia Dunn-Lee, Harriette Cole(+ me) is now-I can’t. It’s a dark day for me. How do you feel?”

I should say, right off the bat, I don’t read Essence. My mother never subscribed, and by the time I got to college, I was a ladymag hater for life. I’ve probably read enough of its content over the years to make up two or three issues. Enough content to know that while Essence is one of the few magazines directed at black women, it certainly doesn’t meet all of our needs. For example, it’s heternormative, and deeply invested in the black middle class. I say all of that to explain that I’m not invested in the product, even though I have friends who read it religiously, and I have friends who have worked there.

Having said that, I can understand where Davis and others are coming from. Fashion highlights the often-fraught relationship between black women and white women. Remember, it’s been one scant generation since a black woman first graced the cover of Vogue (and considering whole issues can go to press without a single black model in them, we haven’t seen much improvement). There’s also the deeply ingrained societal idealization of white femininity — something a black woman will never be able to achieve, no matter how straight her hair gets. Essence is also one of the few publications nurturing a significant number of black writers and editors — there is literally a handful of black editors at fashion mags in this country. So it’s no surprise to me that hiring a white woman to determine the course of fashion and beauty at a black publication evoked such a strong reaction.

But it’s a short-sighted and ahistorical reaction. Angela Burt-Murray, the editor-in-chief, wrote a response to the furor, saying that the magazine was “founded to empower, celebrate, and inspire black women to climb higher, go further and break down barriers. Our commitment to black women remains unchanged as we continue to stay laser-focused on those principles–no matter who works with us.” And ultimately, Essence is part of Time Inc. It has shareholders to answer to, and financial goals to meet. In order to continue working at its founding principles (whether or not it actually is, is debatable, in my opinion), the editor has to make decisions that should be easy, but aren’t, like hiring the best person for the job even if that person looks nothing like the target demographic. Besides, as Burt-Murray notes, Placas freelanced for the magazine for six months, with no readers being the wiser at the ‘infiltration.’

As an aside, I also think those who are outraged are missing something crucial about the history of what we call “black” publications, or TV shows, or even colleges. White people have always been involved, to some extent. This is unlike the other side of the coin, where whites have often historically had trouble including people of color (Vogue is one example, most network television shows are another). Girlfriends and The Game, two television shows that targeted the same demographic Essence does were produced by white Republican Kelsey Grammer. Both shows featured mostly black, heavily female casts. And speaking personally, when I was a child and my father worked at a black newspaper in Southern California, the paper’s production guy was white. While he didn’t have editorial input, his work still heavily influenced the paper. It didn’t make it less black. To go further back, whites helped found many historically black colleges–although not necessarily out of altruism–including my alma mater. And today, no one would say that Howard isn’t a black school, even if it has white professors.

I don’t think there’s anything to fear in the hiring of Placas. And, if by chance, some intangibles are lost, the readers of Essence will vote with their pocketbooks and the editorial staff will learn what is and isn’t acceptable to its readership. But I predict everyone will actually forget about this in six weeks. And I wish Placas the best at her new gig.