Look at the title of today’s post and you can see why I chose a fractal called Denim. Sometimes it can be hard to pick an image but there are times like this when it is simplicity itself. So--on with the post!-
This weekend I learned something about buying women’s clothes that really surprised me. Buying jeans isn’t as easy as you might think! I mean--how difficult should it be? Find the right waist size and you’re good to go--right? Wrong! In fact, it is a hard, dare-I-say-it, often torturous process that is frankly too much for us mere males to endure. Here is the tale of how I learned this lesson the hard way.
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Robyn wears jeans every weekend without fail. It started with “Casual Friday” at her office and she really got into jeans as weekend wear. She has two pairs, one to wear while the other is in the laundry. About a month ago she decided she needed to swap out a pair that had gotten damaged. Thus began our odyssey through the dark side of women’s wear.
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I found some reasonably-priced jeans in the Woman Within Catalog: (for those of you not in-the-know Woman Within is the new name for the Lance Bryant catalog franchise--dunno why they felt the need to change their name.) Her “boyfriend jeans” arrived early last week: turns out “boyfriend jeans” is fashion code for “they have no ass.” (Robyn is “blessed” in the bootie department.) After this debacle Robyn decided she needed to try on the jeans before she bought. And so we went from store, to store, to store looking for jeans that fit…
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You might think--how difficult can it be to fin jeans? An item as ubiquitous as jeans should be available in quantity at virtually any store--right? Wrong!!! Turns out even finding jeans is difficult then one you find a store with jeans you have to content with which style--high rise, low rise, straight leg, boot cut, “skinny” jeans (that really shouldn’t be marketed to anyone above a Size 4). Get through that and you have to worry about proportion: many jeans come in short, average and tall. (Robyn is just on the cusp for “short” and “average”--which adds one more layer of difficulty.) I’m not even going to get into the various denim finishes for fear my head will explode. Suffice it to say that buying the right pair of jeans requires dedication, effort and a lot of stamina.
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Our quest began at J. C. Penny. “Penny’s” is a safe store for shoppers: you don’t have to worry about things being too “edgy” or outré. The quality is reasonable and so are the prices. I thought we’d surely be able to find some nice jeans here. What we found were a few pairs of jeans in two different styles. She tried on both styles in three different sizes but nothing quite fit right so we moved on. (“Low” rise jeans are fine for “Skinny Minnies” but “real” women should probably stay away from them.)
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Next we went to Mervyn’s--home of all things cheap and trendy (not to mention a high level of tacky). We found three different styles of jeans here (all in "broken" sizes). One pair that “almost” fit but weren’t quite comfortable enough to warrant a purchase. Here, we learned another interesting tidbit about the jeans world: jeans manufacturers regularly size their garments smaller than most other garment makers. (I found this particularly surprising considering the female obsession with size.) From Mervyn’s we went to Target--where we found their women’s wear section to be about thirty square feet. That store had exactly three pair of jeans in total. Needless to say Robyn didn’t find anything she could use here either.
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I began seeing a pattern that really bugged me--the lack of available (not to mention half-way good looking) clothing in Women’s sizes. Currently the median size for an American woman is Fourteen. According to one source that 40+% of American woman are above a Size 16. Somehow though, this isn’t reflected in the availability of “Plus Size” clothing. There are huge departments for “Misses” (but try to find something above a Size 14) while “Women’s Wear” is relegated to some backwater in the store with few choices (many of which are just plain ugly) and prices that are far higher than would be indicated by the additional material used. This makes no sense to me on an economic level. Why are the stores neglecting such a large share of the market? (I suspect answering that is a subject for another day--by a wiser head then me.)
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Robyn finally found a pair of jeans that worked for her at The Avenue--which is a semi-upscale “Plus Size Boutique.” Here she five styles to choose from--and only one of them came close to fitting her properly. She paid about $26 (after a 40% off coupon AND the item being on sale). At this point I’d have heave paid just about any price just to be finally free of the insanity: I'm just curious to know when something has basic as jeans became so darn expensive??? Still, at this point I was just glad that she finally found something, anything that worked for her and I wouldn't have to do this any more!
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Then she told me she needed to replace her other pair of jeans…
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