Recently, there has been some concern how popular the teen clothing retailer Brandy Melville is becoming. And this is mainly due to the fact that they mainly sell clothing in size small or one size fits all.
Honestly, I don’t see a problem here.
But many disagree. The reasons varied from Brandy Melville having only young, white, skinny and long-legged girls as models, from fetishizing skinniness to fat-shaming.
While racial diversity may in fact be an issue, the shaming and fetishizing seems to be pushing it.
Brandy Melville does not say “you’re fat,” or “you should be ashamed of how you look.” And if you think any clothing retailer can say that to you, you should reconsider how you hear things.
And about fetishizing skinniness: in the world we live in today, is there anything — mainly, any type of appearance — that can’t be fetishized? When it comes down to it, I think fatness is fetishized no less than skinniness is, and they both carry a variety of negative and positive connotations.
Brandy Melville only offers clothing for those with a waist of around 25-inches.
And the question I want to ask is, so what? It’s like that original version of the classic Cinderella story, where the evil step-sisters try to squeeze into the glass shoe and end up mutilating their feet to fit in the shoe (if memory serves right, one of them cuts off her toes, while the other cuts off her heel).
Now we’re all capable of knowing the absurdity in that well before our teenage years.
And yet, even so, people endlessly bring up studies and statistics that show alarming numbers of teenage girls feeling pressured to be skinny or even going as far as engaging in unhealthy weight control behaviors like fasting and self-induced vomiting.
Though I acknowledge these problems, they share little relevance to the sizing choices of one clothing retailer. Yes, indeed, this popular retailer might pressure certain teens to feel insecure about their body image, but there are many teens that do not feel insecure about their body image, even knowing that they won’t fit into Brandy Melville clothing.
Brandy Melville clothing size is not the problem. And instead of attacking the sizing choices of a specific retailer, one should look to more direct ways to solve these much more personal issues that teenagers and even adults deal with.
But on the other hand, we could recommend Brandy Melville that for the purposes of successful marketing and appealing to a larger consumer pool, perhaps they should consider being more diverse with the models they use and the clothing sizes they offer.
nywu@indiana.edu
