Drawing the line on Dress Sizes

Weight and dress sizes were never on my radar until I started my own clothing line early this year. Prior to this, dress size is something I thought was a clever yet not perfected numerical method of narrowing down items when buying clothes.

When I started making my first set of samples, I thought I will make the samples for UK size 8, which is my size as well as the size of the model I had in mind. The shock came when we had our first meeting with a high-end advertising agency in London. They were so outraged to hear the word “UK size 8”, which apparently was considered “way too big for sample luxury wear” and they insisted the clothes they promote had to be in a sample size UK 4. One of our models, let’s call her “Jess” was with us in this meeting when the marketing manager turned to her and asked, “It is entirely in your hands. If you could at least temporally get down to size 4, then we can fit you in”

Despite of the numbness that was going through my mind I managed to turn to her and say, “Jess, You don’t have to. This is how it starts. It is a start of a very dangerous slippery slope”. Needless to say the agency and our team could not agree on the size issue and we decided not to make a partnership.

It has been a long time since then and there has been at least half a dozen more incidents like this where I was asked why don’t I use a UK size 4 model instead of UK size 8? The simple answer is, it fits the models we have in the team and I see no reason to change a perfectly good member of our team so that we can make slimmer clothing.

I stand by this. I believe women in all sizes, shapes, ethnicities are beautiful. We are very different from each other with unique personalities, unique talents and with unique styles. And as much as I love style and fashion, a healthy life is far more precious to me and in many ways every single day that is healthy is a miracle of nature I forever treasure!