A Modest Proposal for Body-Positive Sizing

It's amazing (in a horrifying way) how much that tiny number or letter on the tag of your clothing can affect your entire sense of self. In the past week or so, I've seen some folks really struggling with body image, and it seems like whenever the matter of body acceptance comes up, the issue of clothing size isn't far behind.

I get it. It's really, really hard not to dwell on that number/letter, especially when it changes. And it's incredibly frustrating that clothing sizes vary so wildly from shop to shop, and often from item to item within the same shop.

We've all been inundated with the message that women should strive to take up as little space in the world as possible: that you can never be too thin, but that being fat is the enemy of style. We're told this in so many different ways: by the uniform body type that most mainstream actors and models have, by stores that don't stock 'plus' sizes, and by the very notion of plus sizing itself. (Plus is equal, people. It's not a separate category!)

It's super hard to deprogram yourself and escape a lifetime's worth of these body-shaming messages. We're taught that descriptive words -- small, medium, large, and so forth -- aren't just innocuous words that identify the range of sizes people might need, but words that contain value judgments in and of themselves. As I would've said in my political theorist days, these descriptors carry normative freight. Some sizes are better than others, we learn, and so we come to believe that the size you wear makes you better or worse: more or less worthy of love and acceptance.

This is terrible, right? New clothes should make you feel happy and excited, not ashamed, because expressing something about yourself through clothing is super fun!

Case in point!

In truth, sizing is arbitrary and irrelevant. That label in your clothes is just a way to quickly figure out which version of a dress/skirt/top is the one you need. The size you wear has less than nothing to do with your worth as a person, or what you deserve from the universe! I'll say it again: all bodies are good bodies, and what really matters is your character, actions, and conduct.

And yet, it's so hard to quiet that critical devil on your shoulder when you think about your clothing size, isn't it? It's hard not to feel bad when someone who wears a smaller size than you expresses body-negative feelings, because it makes you wonder: if they feel bad about themselves, shouldn't I feel worse?

Spoiler alert: nope! Negative body image has nothing to do with whether your body aligns with societal standards for thinness or beauty. It can affect anyone, regardless of what they look like. Coincidentally, that's how I know that those insidious feelings of not-pretty-enough are a trick my mind is playing on me. The feeling of never-enough-ness isn't rooted in any sort of objective truth about your body. To borrow a phrase: it's a trap: a useful trap that keeps women docile, self-doubting, dependent on validation from others, and willing to continuously shell out money just to chase that feeling away for a little while. But I digress!

Back to the point: I have an idea for taking some of the implied judgment out of those little labels that tell us which things will fit our bodies. Instead of using numbers or small-medium-large-etc to label our clothing, why not use colors?

I'm (obviously) a huge fan of colors. I find myself in love with just about every color combination I see, and while my heart will always belong to green and red, my closet is full of dresses in every color of the rainbow. So to me, using colors to label clothes is a no-brainer. After all, does anyone see purple (or yellow, or pink) as an inherently bad color to be? You might have a favorite, of course, but will you really feel the same sting if you go into a shop and need to get a size indigo instead of a size green? Will you feel bad when your size-orange friend vents about her body-acceptance struggles?

Heck, you wouldn't even need to label sizes in rainbow order! Alternately, why not use words for the various shades of a given color (e.g. chartreuse, lime, hunter, kelly, mint)?

Dress: Hearts and Found Lana in "On a different wavelength"

Shoes: Sam Edelman (similar)

Belt: Doll Me Up

Earrings: Atomic Lucite

So that's my idea for decoupling size labels from the value judgments we associate with them. And if any clothing companies out there are reading this, you can make this happen. In the meantime, if you've been struggling with what's on the tag of your clothing, take a moment to think about this idea. Is being a size [fill in the blank] really that different than being a size burnt sienna?

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