Guest Author - Kass McGann
When I was an impressionable kid of 14, my Mum took me to buy a new pair of jeans. Note that I was probably 100 lbs soaking wet and tall enough to be a fashion model. But at age 14, everything is a personal slight.
We went into a store whose jeans I liked and I tried on a size 6, my usual size. I could get them zipped up, but I couldn't sit down comfortably, so my Mum suggestion I try a size 8.
To a 14-year-old, this alone was a devastating blow. "I can't need a BIGGER size! I'm so FAAAAAAAAT!"
But I tried them on.
And I couldn't zip them up at all.
I think I ran out of the dressing room crying.
Luckily, I have a Mum who works in the garment industry. Once I calmed down, she explained something to me. In the factory she works in, they have dress forms for each size. Before the garments they make go on the truck to the stores, one random garment from each lot is tested on the dress forms.
In other words, a size 8 would have never been smaller than a size 6 in my Mum's factory.
But this was the early 1980s and garment factories all over the US were closing down and production was being sent overseas. Consumers wanted more and more garments at cheaper and cheaper prices. And garment workers in the US were already very poorly paid. So garment manufacturers took production to countries where wages were very low and garment production very cheap.
As evidenced by my experience with that pair of jeans, Quality Control was one of the things that was lost with this move. Just because another country has a lower cost of living doesn't mean that their garment production is the same as it is here. There are language barriers as well as cultural concerns at stake. And I can guarantee that the factory that produced those jeans I tried on never randomly checked any of their garments on a standard-sized dress form.
The moral of this story is don't base your body image on the number on a tag like I did when I was fourteen years old. And buy quality. It always rewards you.
