We have managed to uncover a huge clothing conspiracy which may explain why you no longer fit into that nice size M shirt, and are now guiltily standing at the counter buying a size L even though you really aren’t all that large.
Yessiree, there’s a bourgeois conspiracy to make the untailored clothes buying public feel guilted, fat and generally uninterested in doing anything to upset the supressed place of the proletarait. It is not the simple fact that fashion has deemed a “skinny fit” to be the standard; the very size has been downsized!
Evidence, you ask for? Dad picked up a shirt at the shops recently, and his established size standard - M - didn’t fit well enough, so he had to step up to a L. Now my Dad has maintained his body shape well enough that for him to change sizes could only mean that the sizes have changed, but Dad bought it anyway, blaming a small drop in physical activity along with the trend for “slim fit”. However! Today he got me to try a shirt from 1998 which is sized M - and it fit!
These days, a standard L size will not fit me any longer, but given that I know that I’ve hardly maintained anything that passes for a figure I reasonably assumed that, yes, I had gone up a size to an XL. And yet, this shirt from 8 years ago sized M, somehow manages to fit near enough to an XL’s sizing of today. An L size shirt strains against my shoulders and biceps, but this shirt fits comfortably! Allowing for 8 years of slight loosening, counterweighed by the fact that Dad observed the shirt has always been pretty loose on him, so it has been worn less often than others might have been, and also allowing for the fact that it may well have been a loose M in the first place, it still is irrefutable evidence that the size of shirts has decreased, not that we as a society and me as a person has grown more obese.
I suspect the blame for this can squarely lie either in two factors. Either clothing manufacturers want to flatter the bourgeois elite - possibly their very sons & daughters - with the oh-so-ideal shape that lets the now-smaller shirts cling tightly to pointless muscles - the aforementioned “slim fit” - and they’ve taken it to extremes by dropping whole sizes. Or - and this is possibly the controversial part of my theory - the sizing has changed from being measured on your average person to - now don’t sue me here - the average Chinese clothing factory worker, where definitions of small, medium, large and extra large are a whole category smaller - and who would deny that a improvished Chinese factory worker is going to be smaller & skinnier than your stock standard westerner?
Skinny fit indeed.