Designated shopper - changing women's dress sizes - Statistical Data Included

Brandweek, Oct 18, 1999 by Laura Shanahan

Ladies, what size do you wear? Pig! Porker! Heifer! That's what you are--or at least what you think you are. Never mind you answered size 2. You still have not "met goal." You know it, and now I know it, having just read this scary story in the New York Daily News.

"Not that long ago, a stylish woman rejoiced to call herself a size 6," it pronounced. "In this time of celebrity X-rays, however, the Calista Flockharts and Courteney Coxes are telegraphing that the new size 'goal' is 0--and in accordance with that fact, everywhere from Banana Republic to Barneys, the size range that used to begin at 4 now starts at the vanishing point."

Well, shut my (Mallomar-filled) mouth. This is news to me, despite my incessant in-store snooping and the fact that I am closer in size to C and C than to, say, Rosie or Rosanne.

But here's the good news for shoppers: If you can't make it, you can fake it. In fact, the designers are in collusion with the delusional-by-choice. Reportedly Anne Klein was one of the first designers to downsize her sizes--it's widely known that her 8 was yesterday's 10--but in recent years, this designated size-shrinkage has been spiraling downward at dizzying speeds. So much so that a Sag Harbor, N.Y., vintage-clothing retailer says her second-hand size-14 Puccis can only be squeezed into by today's size-6-wearing customer, which "drives people nuts, because everybody wants to be a small size. So I just take the labels out..."

Now here's the good news for you marketers: Join us in the dance of denial, artificially deflate those digits, give us a size we savor and we're your sales slaves. Listen to the womanly wisdom of designer Rebecca Taylor sizing up her "sisters": "If you're a size 4 and you fit into a 2, you feel fantastic, slim and gorgeous. But if you try on size-4 pants that don't fit, and you have to take a size 6, you're not going to buy those pants, because you'll feel devastated."

But there's no need for us to feel devastated and--you caught those key words above: *"not ... buy"*--when we can feel deliriously deluded and load up on lying labels. And pretty lies are what we lust for. Have you ever heard anyone complain, "Damn, how did I drop a dress size?" despite the bedeviling fact that as sizes keep getting smaller, we keep getting bigger. Stats say the current generation is the most overweight since, well, since stats have been kept, and no slow-down's in sight. Whew, good thing manufacturers are finally hopping on those size 0s, eh?

Don't know if denial, as a trait, is often twinned with testy, but there was a recent letter to Ann Landers from a size "22W or 24W" reader: "It is damaging enough to admit I wear those sizes, but why must there be a 'W' after the number? Do the manufacturers think I don't know my butt is Wide? Do they have to remind me ... (blather, snort, froth, growl)." Missouri, as she signed herself, needed to be shown: ''W'' stands for "women."

It's not just clothing makers, of course, that traffic in fantasy figures or tricky terminology, the translations of which consumers know, when we care to conjure them. For example, we've all figured out that the "large" size of many grocery items is, in fact, the smallest one. OK, maybe not Missouri; but most understand this common code. We know if we want something really large, as opposed to labeled "large," we have to look for "economy-size, "jumbo-size," "we-don't-practice-birth-control-in-our-family-size," whatever.

Speaking of procreation, and to show this isn't all girly stuff, condom makers would do well to jump on the slippery-sizing slope. Only go in reverse of the downhill women's clothing team and ski upward, a la the groceries. Instead of, say, Trojan's "formfitting" (snicker) Ultra Fit, Regular, Large and Magnum, howsabout Large, King, You de Man! and, as in every deal, trumping all, Trump the Condom. Presidential-quality, of course.