Women Are Sharing Their Clothing Sizes For An Important Reason

Women are sharing their clothing sizes as part of #NoSizeFitsAll campaign

Despite our fitness routines and consistent numbers on the scale, our clothing labels are almost never identical.

Different brands mean different fits and a variety of sizes make it into our closet. And we shouldn’t feel ashamed about that fact, which is exactly why women are sharing their clothing sizes online as part of the #NoSizeFitsAll campaign.

While some clothing brands are moving toward a more realistic representation of women, the fashion industry’s still largely behind the times. So the Women’s Equality Party decided to do something about it and started the social media campaign #NoSizeFitsAll to challenge the fashion industry’s body image issues. They asked women to join the movement by sharing pics of their clothing labels during London Fashion Week. They are calling on London Fashion week to use two different sample sizes: one of which must be a UK size 12 or above.

One-in-five women in the UK cut the label out of their clothes, according to the Women’s Equality Party. And of those who do so, 70 percent said it’s done “out of shame and embarrassment at their size.” We feel you, ladies. I’ve cut a few tags out of dresses in my day. For awhile I’d constantly hide my size from boyfriends, but seven years into a relationship and my bad habits have been broken. Why? Because feeling shitty about our size sucks and a lot of women are sick of an industry that constantly shoves this message down our throats.

Plus, we’ve got science on our side. “Researchers at Durham University found that using models who are more representative of the actual population could help girls and women develop a healthier attitude towards eating,” Mashable reported.

The lead author of the study, Dr. Lynda Boothroyd, explained the results and shared that the study “really gives us some food for thought about the power of exposure to super-slim bodies. There is evidence that being constantly surrounded through the media by celebrities and models who are very thin contributes to girls and women having an unhealthy attitude to their bodies.”

The average woman doesn’t wear a size two, and as a society we don’t want our daughters, mothers, sisters, and friends becoming obsessed with unrealistic body images. It’s time for the fashion industry to take note and according to the Women’s Equality Party make some serious changes. The group is also advocating for the below changes in the way UK magazines and fashion designers handle the female body:

• “We are calling on the British Fashion Council to commit to ensuring that fashion designers showing at London Fashion Week show 2 different sample sizes in every range, one of which must be a UK size 12 and above;
• We are campaigning for a change in the law so that fashion models below a BMI of 18.5 must be seen by one of an accredited list of medical health professionals, and deemed well before a modelling agency is allowed to employ or reemploy them.
• We are asking for a commitment from UK-based fashion publications to include a minimum of one plus-size (UK size 12 or above) editorial fashion spread in every issue.
• We believe that body image awareness must be made a mandatory and core component of personal, social, health education in schools, with a specific focus on media depictions of beauty, delivered by trained experts as opposed to teachers who specialise in unrelated disciplines.”

Your move, fashion industry.