Not only can ads and models be demoralizing, but so can a lot of the clothing being sold today. If you look around a “juniors” department, where teenagers and young women traditionally have shopped, you’ll notice that much of what’s available is extremely flimsy and skimpy— even more so than during the miniskirt era—so that any young woman with even the slightest bit of extra padding is going to feel self-conscious in a lot of the garments. Reports one parent of a teenager: “The skirts available are either very long, as in evening wear, or very short, as in women-of-the-night wear, with no easy-to-move-around-in middle ground. If a girl wants a comfortable dress to wear to school, forget it.” The next size category up, “misses” clothing, also offers women a lot of body-baring items, such as cropped or tank tops and garments made out of stretchy or thin material. Some fashion writers feel that this trend is a result of clothing manufacturers trying to cut costs; it’s cheaper to use thin material and less of it. In addition, by relying on stretchy synthetic material rather than something like linen, the manufacturer can get away with offering only a few sizes of an item—small, medium, and large—rather than a more extensive collection of numbered sizes. Whatever the reason, the fashion trends today are not kind to women looking for clothes that are forgiving to a less-than-perfect body. Says one person connected with the fashion industry: “You currently have a lot of women going around feeling bad because they look bad in clothes. It never occurs to them that the problem is the shoddy clothes!”
Even children’s departments are selling a lot of skimpy, “sexy”-type clothing for little girls. Parents report having to resort to catalog shopping, particularly from European catalogs, for functional and appropriate clothing for girls and teenagers.
*53\233\8*