Size matters…not?

Size matters not. Look at me. Judge me by my size, do you? Hmm? Hmm.
And well you should not. For my ally is the Force, and a powerful ally it is.
Life creates it, makes it grow. Its energy surrounds us and binds us.
Luminous beings are we, not this crude matter.
You must feel the Force around you;
here, between you, me, the tree, the rock, everywhere, yes.
Even between the land and the ship.
– Yoda, Empire Strikes Back

I do a lot of shopping at Goodwill and various other thrift and consignment stores. What began out of necessity – grad school budget – became something of a hobby. It’s like a treasure hunt to find interesting things and good deals. I’ve found vintage 1960’s Mikasa dishes for less than half of what they are worth, a sewing machine that goes for $400-600 online for $55, $120 shoes for $10, clothes from Talbots, Chicos, Nine West, Banana Republic, Ann Taylor, Vera Bradley, Dooney & Burke – for pennies on the dollar. I decked out my entire family (grandparents, niece & nephews, all 8 of us) for Virginia Tech homecoming one year for less than $20. I remember when I found a long suede leather skirt for $4.

Despite the list I just gave, the one thing I really don’t like shopping for in thrift stores are clothes. Two main reasons – the majority of what’s there is there because it is out of style and/or worn out. The nice stuff, the really good finds, are few and far between. The other reason is that most places do not sort them by size. It is tiresome having to look at every piece of clothing not just to see if I like it but to check the size before I can even consider trying it on.

Most of the stores in our area at least sort things by color and since I basically wear a uniform to work (company shirt with either black or khaki pants), it is easy to go right to that section look for what I need and move on. Then there is the third reason I avoid shopping for clothes there if I don’t have to – the number of times I find the size tags cut out of really good clothes. Really??

My Mental commentary upon finding such… Were you that ashamed of your size that you couldn’t bear for the dry cleaner to see what size you wore? These are even too small for me – if you are that small you have no room to be ashamed! I mean it’s not like your husband or boyfriend doesn’t already know what size you are! Really?!?!? 

I’ll grant that sometimes tags are cut out because they are scratchy or annoying. But to cut one out of a nice pair of dress slacks or a suit? Then today I wondered – how many of those women cut out those tags so that the size really didn’t matter? Probably not many, but who knows.

I thought about most of this because of a blogpost written by a friend.
Called: Size Matters hopecalls.blogspot.com
She talks about shopping for school clothes for her growing daughter and the challenges faced raising kids to truly believe size doesn’t matter. I can distinctly remember shopping for school clothes one year and realizing that the cute clothes in the juniors sizes didn’t fit right anymore. They would fit, they just didn’t look right. Suddenly I went from being shaped like a little girl to being shaped more like a woman. I was horrified when my mother dragged me over to the misses section – you know, where the adults shopped for clothes. This was the mid-eightes…they didn’t make cute or what I considered stylish clothes in all sizes like they do now. I stood right there in the middle of JCPenney and cried. I was already self-conscious enough about my body changing, now I had to buy the clothes to go with it. Some days I’m not sure how I survived middle school.

My day today was filled with laundry, then the sorting and reorganizing of most of my clothes. I spent a lot of time looking at sizes. I have, like most women, quite a range. I didn’t try much on, because even though I’m making positive progress, my body size hasn’t really changed that much and I know what fits. Give me another couple of weeks and I’ll probably spend a day trying on everything in my closet…sorting it by what fits and what doesn’t, what things I’ll try on the next month…and, hopefully, what things will be too big and be going to Goodwill. Maybe I’ll look at the sizes, maybe I won’t. Maybe I’ll just cut the tags out.