Liar, Liar, Pants… Are Liars…

Wait, what? Oh, right. Your pants lie to you.

For years we males have been baffled by women’s sizing systems. I mean, how someone can be a size negative one and still occupy three dimensional space makes as much sense as a left handed hammer.

“Not us” we told ourselves. “Our pant sizes are just waist circumference in inches, by inseam in inches.”

"Do I look fat in this? No? Remember that next time you say I was a size 16 - or I'll haunt you."

As it turns out, that’s crap.

Men’s apparel manufacturers have started slipping us the same drug they’ve been stealthily feeding women for a while now; vanity sizing. As the name implies, the numbers on the sizes are more about making you feel good about yourself than about providing a measure. Why? Because they once did provide a measure, and so we still associate the size number with what it should mean.

You often hear it mentioned that Marilyn Monroe was a size 16. At 5.5″ the voluptuous Norma Jean (you know that’s the same person – don’t play that game) was a respectable 21 on the BMI scale. Like a girl I once dated (coincidentally about the same height) Marilyn had an incredibly narrow back and rib cage but big boobs. Unlike the girl I dated, Marilyn also had full hips. In her younger years the woman who still defines Hollywood Star to this day clocked in at 36-23-35.

So why do people go around saying she was a size 16? Sizes have slid for women for decades. As the average person has become ‘bigger’ (euphamism for more of us being overweight) a certain size becomes roomier too – across the board. A modern size 4 would have been called a size 16 n the pre-1950s scale. Going by her measurements in the 60s, Marilyn was about a modern size 8.

In a way these discrepancies make sense; Lip Service is manufactured in Los Angeles and targeted at Los Angeles pseudo-goths. LA is famous for being a stick bug mound as it is, and many of the models are from Silver Lake where many of the Los Angelinos living there have to wear heavy shoes to keep from blowing away in a stiff breeze. When the clientele you test-fit your clothing on all skew to the slender, it makes sense to set your ‘medium’ as what would be a ‘small’ in, say, T-shirts sold at WalMart nationwide.

The downside to this, which I experienced when I owned a clothing store and stocked Lip Service clothing, is this: girls outside of that community of the emaciated from which Lip Service drew their models would ask for a ‘medium’ and it would, of course, be too small. They’d end up buying a large and tearing the tag out.

Or not buying the item at all, because having to buy a large would be sorta-kinda saying that she was getting fatter – even if the item that said L on the tag was the same physical measurements as all the ones that said M in her existing wardwobe.

Either way her feelings would be at least a little hurt.

To buy a garment that says S instead of M, conversely, makes the girl feel better about herself and gives her esteem a little boost… whether it has anything to do with reality or not. Similarly, to say Marilyn Monroe was a  size 16 makes some girls feel better about themselves (vanity – see where this is going?) .

Which is sad, really, because to think the Ashley Grahams out there would feel bad about their appearance based on what a tag in their clothing says is just one more example of our failure as a society.

So when a guy my age (37) wears a size 34 jeans, and wore the same when he was 14, it seems as though nothing has changed. He can strut around feeling like he still has the body of an athletic teen, only without the pimples, awkward voice, and secret fear of females. The pimples and awkward voice are way behind him.

Back in reality, once again, a size 34 doesn’t mean the man has a 34 inch waist – it could mean anything from 34 to 39 inches!

There are those who sniff and say that vanity sizing doesn’t exist. They usually go on to say that vanity sizing would mean the more expensive garments would have a more generous cut. That presumes that a) only manufacturers of higher end garments have thought that appealing to their customers’ vanity could increase sales, or b) wealthy people are more overweight.

If they’re going to go around making those sorts of claims, soon they’ll utter – and with just as much wisdom – that ducks live deep underground and have an economy that uses baseball cards for currency.

The sad reality is that with the exception of some clothiers like Lip Service, who use “West Coast Sizing” (where what normally is a small is a medium on their labels, etc ) most manufacturers are generous in their measurements these days. Old Navy is, in the informal study performed by Esquire, the king of the hill when it comes to fiction in men’s waist sizes.

Don’t believe me? Have a look at this chart that I worked and slaved over by yoinking it from the fine folks at Esquire: