Finding 'Your Size' In Women's Jeans Is Impossible And This Viral Tweet Proves It

Viral tweet perfectly illustrates why shopping for jeans is the worst

Ask just about any woman and she’ll tell you that shopping for jeans sucks. You have to spend hours in and out of fitting rooms because you truly never know what size is going to fit you. Don’t believe me? This viral tweet perfectly illustrates how maddeningly inconsistent women’s jeans sizes can be.

18-year-old Chloe Martin has a closet full of jeans she bought in a size 12, because that’s her size, or so she thought. She recently pulled out a pair to wear during a night out, and was surprised to find they wouldn’t even fit over one of her legs. It inspired her to pull out seven pairs of size-12 jeans and snap a photo to show that that number, 12, means literally nothing.

The pants, all laid out on top of one another, are clearly very different sizes. Yet according to their tags, they should be the same. This is the struggle women face when it’s time to shop for denim.

The photo has since gone viral, with hundreds of thousands of retweets, showing exactly how relatable this struggle is.

“I literally just posted it cause I thought my friends would see it and think it was kind of funny and relate to it, but I didn’t realise 290,000 people had the same issue!” Martin told Scary Mommy. “Lots of people relating thought it was just them.”

Martin said she can understand why brands would want to mislabel their clothes, because it gives women a confidence boost when they fit into a pair of pants smaller than the size they thought they wore.

“If you go into a shop and you buy a size 10 pair of jeans that fit, you’re going to want to keep going there instead of the shop down the street that you are a size 14 in,” Martin said. “However, it’s very frustrating when you’re a different size in each shop.”

Plus, of all the things women have to worry about, the size of their pants should be far from the biggest issue on their minds.

“There’s so many social pressures on women already so we don’t want to have to worry about jean sizes, too!”

Responses to Martin’s tweet have been a chorus of people fed up with inconsistent sizing, not just in jeans but in all kinds of clothes.

Is the solution to just quit denim altogether and stick to leggings? Some people think so.

https://twitter.com/jetpack/status/1104888312966320128

Others are pointing out how these sizing inconsistencies make it pretty much impossible to shop online, which is a huge bummer for people who enjoy the convenience of not spending hours at the mall just to buy some pants.

What’s actually worse than the fact that this is frustrating and makes shopping entirely too time-consuming, is the effect it can have on women and girls’ self esteem.

So in 2019, I propose a few changes to the entire jeans-shopping experience. First, let’s stop letting a completely arbitrary number on a tag dictate our self worth. Whether you’re a size 0 or a size 20, it doesn’t matter because somewhere in the world, there’s probably pairs of pants in both those sizes that are exactly the same dimensions. And second, let’s petition clothing companies to adapt some sort of standard that makes sizes more consistent and predictable. If we keep speaking up about how much this sucks, maybe some companies will see it and start to change. It’s worth a shot.