elizaskinner.net – the jambox

When I was a kid my mother once told me that the cheaper a store is the smaller their sizes run. She would lay this kind of info on me out of the blue, usually in the car on the way home from school or to ballet or whatever. Out nowhere my mother would just blurt “Fat cells don’t disappear when you lose weight, they just shrink, so they can come back anytime” or “Men wake up with erections every single morning. It doesn’t mean anything.” They usually had to do with sex or fatness, like jarring public service announcements from Lifetime.

Anyway, this info about clothing sizes stuck with me, and I used it to judge my overall worth depending on the store. In fact, it is the only thing that keeps my heart beating in an H&M dressing room. It’s not the dresses or even skirts that are a problem – it’s the fucking goddamn pants. Seriously, they’re not even shaped like a human body – I can go higher and higher in size and it makes no difference. I would not be shocked to find a tail-hole in the butt. Unless I have forgotten how to operate a pair of pants, H&M designers size their pants to crutches and ski poles.

The GAP and Old Navy, on the other hand,  have become the darlings of the US by bucking my mother’s standard and creating giant flabby cheap clothes (usually with some elasticity built in just so you know they love you no matter what.) If I am feeling down, I know I can always walk into an Old Navy and magically be 2 sizes smaller than I was on the street. AND I am instantly so rich I can afford bags full of clothing that will make me feel even skinnier after I wash them once and they explode into their true spirit-size.

But in truth, internet, the best place for me to shop for pants is that strip of stores right between a Popeyes’ and a discount furniture store. The place with mannequins that are just legs and giant butt. Because the butt is the problem, really – that is where the sizing in all the other stores goes haywire. These are the stores that do not try to hide the butt or average it out – these stores know you can be a size 4 with a big butt. They also know that this butt doesn’t need to be excused, it needs to be celebrated -with rhinestones and decals. These stores have names like “Sheeba” or “Divaz”, and they sell plastic neon belts and cropped jackets to show off this celebrated well-fit butt.

So, despite what my mother told me, I have found that price has little to do with the skewed sizes in stores, that sleeping with boys will make them like you more, that skipping breakfast won’t necessarily make you fat, and not every dude not every morning.

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 1st, 2009 at 1:28 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.