BuzzFeed's takedown of Brandy Melville's idea of "one size fits all".

[randomness]

Refinery29 did a post about what happened when BuzzFeed found five women of varying sizes to try on seven pieces from Brandy Melville:

[W]hile A&F has seen its fair share of controversy, Brandy Melville perpetuated a contentious concept Abercrombie has not: one-size-fits-all clothing. With almost 50 stores worldwide and a booming e-commerce site, the Italian-based retailer has popularized the “Brandy Girl” image. She’s the high-school popular girl with long hair and even longer legs, and she's attended Coachella for the last five years. She is also, it seems, probably between a size 00 and 2. At last, BuzzFeed decided to call the all-American retailer on its narrow definition of "all."

I like that BuzzFeed found women with a wide variety of body shapes to try pieces on, apparently without having to go beyond their own staff. Their reactions are occasionally surprising and often hilarious.

Kristen had what I thought was the best one-sentence summary: "I don’t think these clothes are so much ‘one size fits all’ as much as they are ‘one size fits a mystery size, to be revealed when you actually try it on.’"

Comments

[rednikki.livejournal.com]

I admire the fact in general that Buzzfeed is putting out some great journalism and opinion pieces and paying for it with cat listicles.

[r-ness.livejournal.com]

It really was brilliant of them to figure out a viable way of paying for journalism.

[digitalemur.livejournal.com]

They've published two really good personal experience essays by rape survivors, one female and one male, in the past week. _In the past week_. I'm really pleased by their essays and long-form material.

[achinhibitor.livejournal.com]

the “Brandy Girl” image. She’s the high-school popular girl with long hair and even longer legs, and she's attended Coachella for the last five years.. She is also, it seems, probably between a size 00 and 2.

Sounds like a good marketing strategy -- any even vaguely popularity-conscious high school girl knows the Brandy Melville styling, so if you're wearing it, your audience knows without having to eyeball your outfit carefully that you're fashionably thin. What makes these clothes popular (i.e., able to sell for well above the cost of making them) is that they're walking labels for lots of attributes that many girls want to advertise. If fat girls (i.e., size 3+) could wear them, nobody would buy them...

[sylphon.livejournal.com]

Much like a grab bag of size.

[r-ness.livejournal.com]

It does seem that way!

[sylphon.livejournal.com]

course, even clothes with actual sizes listed end up about the same as the one size garments, with no real consistency.

[r-ness.livejournal.com]

True. Thinking about it, there may be a way in which Brandy Melville is taking advantage of that by simply producing lots of items cheaply and never really worrying about size. They get one size close to their ideal and then forget about having to proportion the rest of the sizes.

This almost certainly saves them money but I don't know how much.

(edited for clarity)

[mizkit.livejournal.com]

Those women are great!

[r-ness.livejournal.com]

They really are!

[donnad.livejournal.com]

The clothing they all tried on was ugly, even on the model. If that's style these days, I'm glad I'm not fashionable.

One size fits all make me run away screaming. Even when I was a preteen, I never fit in a size smaller than 10/12.

[r-ness.livejournal.com]

If that's style these days, I'm glad I'm not fashionable.

Yeah, there's definitely a reason why the clothes in my Facebook feed are basically all vintage, all the time. Not completely, but almost. This is trendy fashion for trendy teens, and will be gone before you know it. Twenty or thirty years from now, the best bits--in someone's opinion--of this will come back, and those bits may actually be worth considering. (And some things may come back which will be awful, but that always happens.)

To me, they were all quite drab. Except for the shorts, which didn't do it for me either, but at least they weren't in greyscale.

[r-ness.livejournal.com]

The other thing that occurs to me is that BuzzFeed may have chosen a particular set of items that photographed well, and that may have meant picking clothes that were nearly all shades of grey. But their website--I haven't been to one of their stores yet--has lots of clothes in the white-grey-black range of greyscale, a few colored patterns, and very little else in colors.

This season, anyway.

[digitalemur.livejournal.com]

It may have been for the photography, but also women working in print/web media in a big city are gonna wear a crapton of black and gray anyway. It's like there's this WEAR BLACK field that emanates from New York City in particular, and from the business centers of a lot of large cities.

[r-ness.livejournal.com]

Yeah, this is definitely true. That trend has been around for longer than I would have thought.

The mental image of that field is going to stick with me for a bit. Complete with electronic *BLOOP BLOOP* noises. :)

[digitalemur.livejournal.com]

I am still dying of laughter over “This is hands down the fanciest diaper I have ever worn.” Maaaan, those shorts.

Trying those clothes on for a photographer and writing that article took a lot of guts. I think it's maybe not easy to realize that, because they handled it with such grace, but it takes a certain level of confidence, and takes having already done the work of rejecting some of our notions of ideal womanhood, to feel comfortable trying on those clothes. It's for exactly the reasons one of them said: that if one of these one-size-fits-most items does not fit you that sends the message that you're not right somehow. I'm about Kristin's size, though with more mass higher and in the front I think, and I couldn't have done this. (Partly because of gender identity stuff, I grant you, but a LOT of it would be about body shape for me.)

Also I loved seeing the photo of them together at the end, because my brain really wanted them to be the same height even though I read their heights. That was REALLY cool.

[r-ness.livejournal.com]

Trying those clothes on for a photographer and writing that article took a lot of guts.

Oh, totally. It did help, I think, that they were doing it together, because--aside from perceived safety in a group--they were collectively showing that the clothes weren't right for most body shapes, as opposed to being singled out for having a body shape that was "wrong".

Also I loved seeing the photo of them together at the end, because my brain really wanted them to be the same height even though I read their heights.

I really liked that photo, too. They shot the individual photos to make each person look similar against the clothing, which was the right way to do what they were trying to do, but the photo with them all together really emphasized how different their body sizes were from each other. I think it was very important to do that.

I nearly put that photo at the top of my post, but then decided that I wanted people to click through. It's possible I should have put it at the top anyway.