The story he posted is about Brandy & Melville, a rising girls' clothing store that sells only one size: Small. All their clothing is labeled as either "Small" or "One Size Fits Most"--but that too, is sized Small. Here is the Huffington Post article about the store.
I find this just ridiculously frustrating--that at this time in our country's history a store would deliberately prey on girls' body consciousness to sell their products. In one sense, it's counterintuitive: why cut out all those thousands of potential customers by not carrying clothing that will fit them? But the marketing is very savvy--evil, yes, but savvy. It exploits the demonization of weight in American girls, creating a tantalizing vision of the "perfect" body. The clothes become just an extension of that desired and unreachable body, and if most girls end up hating themselves for their failure to "measure up," well, then, that's good for the bottom line.
A question, though. One commenter writes,
Alana Balboni · Top Commenter · DrexelIn the interest of fairness, if we're going to have stores that cater exclusively to plus size, we also need to allow stores that cater exclusively to very thin girls. If it's not a successful business model, it'll die out on it's own, everyone knows trends change with the wind.
Reply · Like · 177 · Follow Post · 20 hours ago
How would you respond to that argument?
In response to the other side of the argument, that it's for the interest of fairness to balance out out plus size stores is actually not all that fair. It's sort of like saying reverse racism is a thing. Which it literally can't be, because the people using these reverse argument's aren't actually in a power position to do so. It's similar with fat shaming and supposed skinny shamming, it's not really equal because there are hundreds of thousands of faucets of the industry that perpetuate the notion that skinny is the only ideal beauty standard, with relatively few on the other side. Skinny people already have a sort of privilege that gives them a different experience, one that's not constantly being discriminated against. So stores like these are actually just blatantly fat shamming in a destructive manner and contributing to these arcane beauty standards.
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