Shopping for clothes can be a gratifying way to indulge yourself, but it's not fun for everyone.
Trips to the dressing room can be tedious, especially for women who spend hours looking for the right sizes for jeans. For 18-year-old Chloe Martin, it's a headache she's all too familiar with.
To illustrate the challenges in finding the perfect jean size, she posted a picture of a problem retailers need to address for their female customers.
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The young shopper from Glasgow, Scotland, wears a UK size 12 pair of jeans. So when she prepared to go out for the night and pulled out a recently-purchased pair from her closet, she discovered that one of her legs wouldn't fit into them.
It was puzzling, given that she always buys a size 12. Something was off.
She told Buzzfeed:
"I was getting ready to go out and I wanted to wear jeans, so I tired on a pair and they would not go past my hips at all, so I took them off and tried on a different pair, same size, but they fitted perfectly, so I took all of my jeans out and was so shocked at the size different between jeans that are [labelled] the same size — and some are the same brand too, so I took a pic and posted it on Twitter."
Martin posted a picture of seven different pairs of jeans that happened to be labeled with the same size. Looking at them all together would indicate otherwise.
Martin called the obvious differences in jean size between different high end retailers as "careless" and "toxic" for young shoppers who may feel insecure about their bodies.
"There's been no efforts to make the sizing more consistent for all, even though if it says a 12, I should be able to go into any shop and know that a 12 will fit me, if that's my size, it's careless and toxic for young people who may be insecure, and a lot of high street stores are targeted towards young women."
She proposed a solution that needed to be addressed ages ago.
"I think they either need to change it to waist and leg length for more accurate measurements, or there needs to be set measurements for each size, because it seems as though there's literally inches between some of my size 12 jeans."
As a result of the sizing problems, Martin said that young female consumers can't be bothered shopping for jeans online anymore, which is a bummer since it's more convenient than going to the mall.
Men claiming they don't experience similar problems makes things worse.
"Then there's a lot of men saying men's jeans do this to, then other men saying they're so glad this doesn't happen to them so a bit of contradiction."
Other shoppers were relieved to discover they weren't alone in their denim dilemma.
The struggle is real.
Shopping can be discouraging because of this.
Men eventually weighed in with their thoughts.
Martin's relatable tweet went viral with 300K likes to date, and she discussed her viral fame with Scary Mommy.
"I literally just posted it cause I thought my friends would see it and think it was kind of funny and relate to it, but I didn't realize 290,000 people had the same issue! Lots of people relating thought it was just them."
Worrying about jean sizes should be the last thing on a woman's mind while shopping.
"There's so many social pressures on women already so we don't want to have to worry about jean sizes, too!"
Could we get some clothing companies to come up with universal sizing across both genders, please?
We don't need the inaccurate number on a label validating our insecurities in 2019. Thanks.
note on @mychal3ts/Threads post