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

[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. :)