Until about a year ago, the way I shopped for clothes was this: go into a shop, pick up a garment in size 10, 12 and 14, try these on in changing room, cry when they mostly didn’t fit, leave shop red-faced, maybe having bought one thing in size 14.
Very occasionally, I’d get into the size 10 of something, usually if it was supposed to be ‘oversized’ and I actually preferred it not being loose, and sometimes just because of a fluke in design that worked for my shape.
In other words, I had absolutely no idea what I was doing, size-wise, and I assumed the shops didn’t either. I was dimly aware that some shops had size charts but I didn’t think they would help. I thought I was something in the arena of a 12-14, or medium, and my approach was just to hurl clothes at myself and see what stuck.
As a strategy, it was rubbish.
Why did I think I was medium? Well, this includes body shape but goes a bit beyond that, too. I perceive myself as distinctly middle: average height, not fat or thin, neither confident nor shy, neither high earning nor struggling. Somehow all of this translated, throughout my 20s and early 30s, into a nothingy self-image of ‘medium’.
I interpreted that as size 12ish and carried this around me with the certainty of my eye colour or A-level results. So I was consistently outraged that medium things didn’t fit me.
Shopping was a confusing, maddening experience. I thought that’s just how it was, and I lacked the patience to find out why and to work out a different way.
It’s pointless thinking of yourself as being size-something, because the shops don’t agree on what that means
That was until a year ago, when it became clear I had put on weight in a noticeable sense for the first time in my life. I’m not sure exactly why, but I suspect a combination of a stint on antidepressants, plain old eating too much, and a mysterious condition called ‘being 33’. I wasn’t in dangerous territory, but I clearly needed new clothes.
More importantly, I needed a new approach. This time, instead of just going into shops and hoping for the best, I decided to measure myself first, and check my measurements against the size charts of the shops I thought I might go to. The whole thing was a revelation.
What became clear to me was that there is no such thing as being a certain size. The shops all have wildly different ideas of what each size means.
At Next, for example, a size 18 means 36in waist, and they make clothes all the way to size 28 (48in waist). Boden’s 18 is L, and will fit a waist range of 34.5-36in, while Monsoon’s 18/L will fit 34.5in maximum. At somewhere a bit more high-fashion such as & Other Stories, an 18 or L means 33in waist, and that’s the biggest they’re prepared to go. At Jigsaw that waist measurement translates as XL or 16, and they don’t go any bigger either.
This is in the UK, where the average waist size of women is 34in.
Once you’ve matched one bit of you against a shop’s size chart, there’s very little chance your other bits will cooperate with the rest of the measurements for a particular size. Unless your body conforms to a strict set of proportions, you’ll probably, like me, have hip, bust and waist measurements that sit in different size columns in those charts.
So, it’s pointless thinking of yourself as being size-something, because the shops don’t agree on what that means anyway, and women’s body shapes and proportions vary hugely.
That number you carry around in your head as one of your defining physical characteristics is unhelpful at best, meaningless at worst. I realised, as I looked at all these conflicting size charts and tried to match my own measurements against them, that not only had I been wrong about the size I was, I’d also been wrong to even think I was a size.
I had been using the wrong terms: it’s the clothes that have a size, not the person.
At first, I was upset – at having to rule out certain shops I liked, and at having bought a few new things in sizes I’d never imagined wearing. The numbers on the new garments hanging in my wardrobe felt shaming.
Shame frequently overpowers the rational thoughts I have when getting dressed in clothes that fit and flow
Because of the misguided way I’d thought about and defined my body, and the cultural ideals and constant discussion around weight and size, I felt that this new size was a label stitched onto me, rather than onto the clothes.
I’m not sure what my measurements were before I put on weight recently, but I suspect I should have been in bigger clothes all along, and the gain forced me to take stock, confront my measurements and work out how to shop better. I now have a much better understanding of my shape and how to dress.
It’s taken some time to come to terms with the size of clothes I now need. Never mind that they’re more comfortable and flattering; I’m still horribly aware of the size on the labels, because I have long-held assumptions about that size and what it means about the body wearing it, and I feel ashamed. That shame frequently overpowers the rational thoughts I have when getting dressed in clothes that fit and flow nicely over my figure.
What I have managed to do, however, is shake off the notion of being a size-something woman. I keep track of my measurements, check all size charts before I shop, and wear a couple of different sizes of garment depending on the shop they come from. I no longer label myself.
We’re defined by so many things already; we really don’t need to be defined by a system of measurement that doesn’t even hold up between two shops that rub shoulders on the high street.
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