December 11th, 2023Kyle’s rant

What’s going on with sizes? The other day I did my usual pre-summer shop for a set of jandals, or as they are inappropriately called thongs, ready for the summer.

I mean who calls a bit of footwear the same handle as a pair of undies that don’t even cover your backside? But back to my hunt for a “pair that air”, jandals that is, it seems my modest size 10 hoof which I thought wasn’t too oafish for my 187cm loft has grown to a size 12 to 13.

How on earth at the ripe old age of 56 have my tootsies become footsies in two summers since I last dropped a large investment on my loafers? This whole question of sizing seems to be rife and doesn’t make sense, after all it’s not as if I pay more for a 13 than a 10, so why decrease the scale?

So, just when I was coming to grips with my new sasquatch status, I slipped into the Mill Markets to grab a retro-style cool summer shirt, the type that doesn’t need ironing and will keep up with my robust knockabout lifestyle (or sufficiently disguise the bump on the front of me).

(The offerings at The Amazing Mill Markets are simply “amazing” and I encourage everyone to get down there for your Christmas shopping. ) But back to my shopping adventure, in the world of chain stores, being a larger gentleman who has been in an okay paddock on occasion, I sit around the XXL through to XXXL in the shirt department.

On trialling an old fashioned 70’s – 80’s era shirt at the Mill Markets, it turns out a XL shirt is like a tent on me and I am more fitted by simply a large label size. This aligns with my fat and size shaming theory. It seems all the chain stores are in on the joke. I know I have thickened a little with the rigours of age, but these guys have doubled down on my self-loathing, the buggers.

It doesn’t make sense that we are consuming more protein, getting bigger as a race and they are decreasing the sizes and material going into our ensembles. In the 1960’s, dinner plates were roughly 9 inches in diameter; in the 1980’s they grew to around 10 inches, by the year 2000, the average dinner plate was 11 inches in diameter, and now, it’s not unusual to find dishes that are 12 inches or larger. You young people can work that out in centimetres.

So we are filling our plates up, upsizing our serves, involved in less involuntary exercise – as in the invention of the TV remote – and feeling disappointed in our appearances because of the media hype.

And to add insult to digestive injury the chain stores are sneaking around swapping a size 10 for a size 12 and having a belly laugh as we try to nostalgically squeeze into something that should fit. I think a revolution is called for.

I say swap the tags, take back ownership of our sizing charts and protest on the streets. All these years hiding my shirt tags and looking fearfully as I slipped towards the “Big Joe” section in Big W and it seems it’s not so much me but them mucking with the labels.

It’s them, not me, size rant over…