It’s called vanity sizing. And Cosmopolitan Magazine published an article last year, posing the question that most intelligent and, dare I say, mature women have been mulling over for the last decade or two: How come I’ve gained weight but my dress size is smaller?

It doesn’t normally work that way. Vanity sizing is putting smaller numbers on larger clothes. And since the U.S. doesn’t have any set sizing standards, it’s been easy to do.

There was a time that a size 8 was the perfect size for a model. Now, it’s a zero or a double zero. And even worse, for some designers, a negative 1 or negative 2. How can your body mass be a negative number?

Some say that vanity sizes dont’ exist in the U.S. You can’t tell me that. Look in my closet and see for yourself the range of sizes for skirts and pants with same measurements. According to the Cosmopolitan article, a study conducted on clothing with a size 4 waist revealed an 8 and a half inch range in measurement.

There was a time when I graduated college, having packed on about 30 plus pounds on this 5′ 1″ frame, and I had to purchase a size 14 pair of pants. That was 1980–the last decade of real sizes in my opinion. Today, those pants would be a size 8 or 10. And that would have been a lie. There was truth in that size 14. The truth was I had gained a large amount of weight and my clothes didn’t lie to me.

That truth has been replaced by another one: Commercial profits. Simply put, the smaller the size, the larger the margins. Designers know that wearing a size you never dreamed possible is enough incentive to get you to purchase that pair of pants. Even though the irony is–you’ll most likely be the only one who sees the label.

My concern is that this manipulation of numbers reflects something weirdly off about our society. Are we that obsessed with being skinny? And how skinny is skinny?

The very real problem of poor self image among preteens and teens, especially girls, which can easily be transferred into adulthood, is fueled by the way we seem to worship ‘thin.’

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