this post was submitted on 01 Mar 2026
57 points (96.7% liked)
Data is Beautiful
3617 readers
79 users here now
Be respectful
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Oof, unpopular opinion there, my dude. I think it was a bit more nuanced than that, but ultimately, I agree with you... I don't think we should be normalising obesity (in its narrowest definition - not what its definition has become). But let's get real, buying clothes for different shapes and sizes can be painful if your body isn't cookie cutter.
It was only slightly more nuanced than that, but I do agree with the author's premise that lack of standardization makes buying clothes that fit well difficult.
It was when they started mentioning the statistics of how many adult women can't wear certain sizes/brands that I realized the heart of this complaint was that too many American women are overweight.
There's two things at play here. People who don't give a shit about how their bodies look are less likely to be vain enough to buy designer clothes. Obese people are hard to make clothes for due to how we all store fat differently.
At the the of the day, if it were profitable, companies would adapt to the size of their customers. It's not profitable (enough) so we get vanity sizes as a compromise.
Yeah, there was a point where it talks about how larger women can't buy straight legged pants, but I imagine there is data that shows that they just don't. Plus I imagine after some larger waist size, the hips and thighs just, no long "work" in straight legged pants.