ADVENTURES IN SHOPPING

I have battled my weight since puberty.  During high school I worked really hard to keep it down and still felt like I was the big girl.  I wore a size 12 dress to my Senior Ball.  It was a beautiful, classic dress and my sister and even my mom borrowed it for events. 

I have kept it all these years and when Maggie was invited to a prom and didn't want to buy a new dress, I suggested she try it on - it's a wrap around in stretchy black jersey fabric making it easy for different sized women to wear it.  I was so shocked to see that it was too small for my size 8 daughter.  It was the first time I had run into "vanity sizing."

I am not hung up on sizing - I buy whatever size clothing I think fits best.  I am not one to wear my clothes tight and form fitting - I prefer to skim over my body and if I need to buy up a size, I do. (Maybe being hung up on clothing label size would have deterred me from gaining weight?)

Today I was reading some blogs and a woman who had weight loss surgery a couple of years ago said she is very surprised to find she's now a size 6.  She looked really great, not squeezed into a too small size.  Then I saw that she listed her weight as 154. The last time I weighed around 150 I was a size 14/16. In fact, that is the goal range I am hoping to get to.  So now I am going to be a size 6 or 8?  Cool. 

The interesting thing about this vanity sizing phenomena is that plus size clothes are not getting bigger.  In fact, many of the department store plus sizes seem to have shrunk down.  I buy most of my clothes online because of this.  I can get a 3x online that fits, but most 3x sizes in the stores don't fit!

In about 6 months my clothes shopping adventures are going to be interesting...

WEIGHT GOES DOWN - SIZE GOES UP

While shopping for a home staging client, I fell prey to one of the dangers of being in Marshall's, Ross and other discount stores - I shopped for myself.  I flipped through the 2 racks of Plus Sized clothes (always the smallest and saddest section of these stores) and came up with 3 tops to try on. 
That day I was wearing one of my old favorite shirts - a pin tucked denim shirt with a v-neck.  It is comfy but it really is too big on me now, I was even wearing a t-shirt under it.  It is a size 2X from Woman Within.   The tops I was going to try on were knits and by eye I could tell I needed to try them in 3X. 

Not one of those shirts fit.  They were too tight, and not just at the hip, where I know I am larger than the average woman.  (I have always had an "hourglass" figure - not busty but I have always had a small waist except now I carry more weight on my stomach and so the hip/stomach area is my hard to fit part.)

I wasn't looking for anything special, no occasion coming up demanding new clothes or anything.  But I must admit to some chagrin that I have lost over 50 pounds and I can't fit into a size LARGER than the one I am wearing!

When I was a young woman, there were no size 0 or 1 clothes.  I wore a beautiful size 12 dress to my Senior Ball.  I still have it.  My mom and sisters have borrowed it over the years because it is such a classic style.  When my daughter needed a dress for an event and we didn't really want to spend money on yet another dress, I suggested she try it on just to see if she liked it enough to wear it.

At that time she was a serious athlete, very strong and fit and she wore size 8 clothes.  She tried on my dress and it was too small.  I was dumbfounded.   It was my first introduction to how much manufacturers have changed the sizes over the years - vanity sizing they call it.

So my question is - if most women's sizes are cut bigger than they used to be...why are plus sizes being cut smaller?  I know there are inconsistencies between designers and fabric types and all that, but has anyone else experienced this?