'Plus Sized' Clothes: Translating the Baffling Euphemisms

Faced with the challenge of coming up with a name that indicates they sell larger sizes, but without actually describing their customers as being overweight or differently-sized in any way, most clothing stores just give up. There seem to be three main strategies:

I. Some Lady's Name

See Lane Bryant or Ashley Stewart. Who are they? Are they famously large women? Do they dress just like large women? You don't know. You just go to the mall and see fucking "Lane Bryant" on the store sign. Sure, all the clothes in the window display are a bit large, but since they're also apparently made for grandmothers, you just assume they're supposed to be shapeless, because that's what everyone seems to think old ladies like. As a teen, I walked in there once looking for an interview suit assuming exactly that; that they make stodgy conservative clothes for old people. And what's better than to look grown up for an interview? It took five minutes of browsing to realize they had nothing smaller than a 14.

II. Some Random Word

See Avenue and Alight. Looking at the number of "random word" stores starting with A, I'm willing to bet they're going through a dictionary and looking for the first words that have nothing to do with being fat or any other negative connotation. Unfortunately, as political pundits have taught us, any word can have a negative connotation if you put your mind to it. If you try to figure out why a plus-sized store would be named Avenue, the only logical conclusion is that they think their customers are as wide as a street. If you look at Alight that way, all you see is cruel, cruel sarcasm.

III. Like The Original Store's Name But Different

Plus-sized version of franchises include Torrid (original store: Hot Topic), Macy's Woman (Macy's), Elisabeth (Liz Claiborne), Faith 21 (Forever 21) and Pure Energy (Target). If you weren't familiar with the names of the original stores, you wouldn't even be able to tell the difference between which is the regular brand and which is the plus-size brand. Seriously, Macy's, you think adding "Woman" to your name means "fat"? Either that's misogynistic or they've got a Macy's Man store full of giant Hawaiian shirts.

Here's a translation of somewhat recent jean styles from GAP (they seem to change monthly), which believe it or not I've historically found the easiest store to buy jeans at.

Boot cut - For skinny people.

Curvy - Fat ass. (For the pear-shaped woman.)

Straight leg (formerly "Classic") - Fat but too weird shaped to fit into Curvy.

Curvy is actually for a pretty particular shape of fat ass, so when that season's curvy jeans aren't catering to you, you have to roll with the "classic," or some kind of formless cut, which due to your jutting butt, will just drape over the rest of your legs like a tent and make them look just as thick as your butt.

GAP also caters to the penguin-shaped woman by having three leg lengths to choose from in each size:

Long - Means long.

Regular - Means regular.

Ankle - Means short.

I love how they are so sensitive about people with short legs that they make up this fiction that normal sized women are buying "ankle" length jeans because they just feel like changing it up and having some jeans that end somewhere above their ankles.

I'm starting to think maybe the whole capris trend was really an effort to cater to ladies with really, really short legs that was way too subtle, so everyone thought they were really supposed to wear them as actual short pants. This has probably been the fashion industry's little inside joke for the past decade.

Outside of GAP-specific terms, other stores also have their own indecipherable names for certain body shapes. For example, "petite" is the code word for "short legs." Technically it's supposed to be for all smaller women, but overall tiny women usually just get size 0's, those jerks. Women buying "petite" sizes are usually just shrunk down vertically and not so much horizontally, created by God to balance a population that contained Manute Bol.

And last but not least, there is "goddess size," found at many fantasy-clothes, Wiccan-clothes and period-costume suppliers, which is so far past the line that I would actually be less embarrassed buying a dress sized "Oink."

For instance, here are some "goddess-sized" clothes for sale.

Where this is what you get if you do an image search for "goddess":

Now, here's where we could wring our hands about how "society" keeps projecting unnatural thinness as an ideal even onto our imagined images of goddesses, but I'm pretty sure a lot of the same people who put on goddess-size dresses are also drawing these hot skinny goddesses and uploading them to deviantart, so there may be a little disconnect in imagining how putting on that dress makes them look.

And it's not limited to heavy girls, as any snapshot of any fan convention or LARP game could probably tell you that most human beings have a hard time noticing discrepancies between what they look like and the fantasy image they think they look like.

So to sum up: If you're overweight and female, you've got to know your shape, hunt through random stores' inventory to figure out if they sell plus-sizes, decipher the code words that store uses for body shapes through trial and error, and repeat that all over again for every store you go to.

If society's goal is to make it so hard that it actually seems easier to just go to the gym, well, we're almost there.

Check out more from Christina, in The 5 Biggest Mistakes Women (Like Me!) Make On The Internet and The 6 Most Insane Crash Diets of All Time.