The often-celebrated champion of “curvy girls” everywhere is the effervescently beautiful Marilyn Monroe. However, the starlet was neither curvy nor plump nor even chesty by today’s standards. In fact, she had a 34-inch bust and 22-inch waist.
Virginia Postrel, columnist for Bloomberg, said the mannequin that held her iconic white pleated “subway dress” at an auction was a size two, and the auctioneers couldn’t even zip the dress onto it.
Monroe, who was in showbiz from the mid-1940’s to the early ‘60s, was considered a size 12. National Public Radio fashion investigator Jessica Siegel said this isolated fact has been the rallying point for image activists everywhere. However, taken in context, it is much less encouraging to the world’s doughnut lovers. While Marilyn Monroe was considered a size 12 in the ‘60s, today she would be a 00. How can this be?
Throughout the years, clothing companies have been engaging in the slippery slope of a marketing scheme known as “vanity sizing.” Vanity sizing is the altering of clothing size labels to trick customers into thinking they lost weight. For example, a store could label what would normally be an eight as a six, a six as a four, and so on. If a customer fits into a size eight dress at Store A and a size six dress at Store B, according to data she will generally purchase from Store B. This works for Store B for a while, but eventually Store A catches on, adjusts its tags, and the competition is even again. The cycle continues every few years, resulting in a gross disparity between what used to be a size 12 and what it is today. In fact, what was considered a size 14 in the ‘30s (34 bust, 24 waist) became a size 8 in the ‘60s. Today, that size eight is a size zero, if that.
Vanity sizing cannot be blamed for the fact that around 17 percent of adolescents and roughly 30 percent of adults are obese or morbidly obese, according to data collected by WIN, the Weight-control Information Network. This does shed a light onto why Americans are seemingly comfortable with being overweight. If the average American is a size 12 now, and Monroe was a size 12 in the ‘50s, and she is the sexiest woman of all time, that means a 12 is still a healthy weight, right? Wrong. People are disregarding the doctors, the government and the facts that warn against being overweight or obese in favor of the pleasant hallucination that they look like Monroe.
Nicole Lichtenberg can be reached at [email protected]
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