I am the exemplar. I am the specimen in your anatomy atlas, the most deeply understood datum in your pathology textbook, the model to whom the parameters of pharmacology apply the most accurately. I am the standard-issue chassis: medically, humanly--decidedly--average. I am the 70-kg male.
Yet an exhausting week weaving up and down midtown Manhattan clearly leaves me thinking that the 70-kg male is dead--at least economically--in the estimation of clothiers and cobblers. Especially this 70-kg male, searching for a simple white shirt with a french cuff that does not make me look like I'm wearing my daddy's nightshirt for walkies. Or for a light jacket, or a pair of trousers, or even a pair of shoes that actually measure what they portend to measure.
As usual, several things are bothering me at the moment and if you know me, then you know that I wouldn't have it any other way.
The fattest common denominator.
It seems that clothing manufacturers and their retail henchmen are complicit in this plot to systematically disrobe those no longer falling within the nation's ballooning average. Put another way, they are seeking to surreptitiously recreate 'average' in their own bloated overgrown image.
This runs deep. Oh I'll feed you, children. Gargle this mindful of truth-flavored listerine:
The people eat. The people get fat. The people try to buy clothes but oh! now they've moved up a couple of sizes and they feel bad, guilt-stricken by their doctors and ridiculed by bufoons in fat suits. Meanwhile, they are herded into Big & Tall and have to start dressing like Cedric the Entertainer. No, you're not going to like the way you look, I guarantee it.
Oh but here's the hat-trick.
The clothing giants, hand-in-dirty-hand with the food conglomerates, agree to slowly increase the real sizes of their clothes while maintaining their labeled sizes. In essence a medium is now the size of what was previously large and a small is now what used to be medium. And the little guy gets shut out. We, the old mediums, are now sifting through piles of small and extra-small and shopping at Petite Sophisticate which is very gay because the stretch-pants-and-skirt look is not unisex.
Système International d'Unités? Bah and harumph.
It doesn't stop there. Not content with the outerwear and the casual vestments of the commonfolk (sized as they are in an appropriately common and course scale: s, m, l, xl, xxl, xxxl, 4xl, 5xl, and two-seat-minimum), the sartorial serpents are infusing their venom into our all-important standard units.
How else could it be that, despite being a very clear 9.5 on the Brannock device (pictured here), I must purchase Johnston and Murphy's in a size 8.5? Or Kenneth Cole's and Aston Grey's in a size 8? So what if I wasn't going to buy them anyway? I should be able to try on a pair of $350 shoes at the store with confidence as I gather the necessary capital over the next few years.
Why is there so much variability in 30x30 trousers? Some fit perfectly, yet many hang from my frame like wet underpants.
Why is it that the neck of this 70-kg male--an exquisitely empiric 14.5 inches--happens to be the smallest size in production anywhere? Still, there is not a 14.5 shirt that will fit me adequately enough to look presentable. When I am told by the helpful salesman at Thomas Pink that I'd be hard pressed to find 'a man's shirt' in my size without having it tailored, and that--if pressed for time--I should shop in the boys' department, I feel so very small. And little boys don't wear shirts with French cuffs, sir. Cufflinks are a choking hazard.
From the ashes, a gaunt phoenix arises!
I know that I am not the smallest man on Fifth Avenue. I know there are people in the Village who share my travails, who've felt the diminution of standing next to the mother of a prepubescent scamp trying not to cringe at the horrible things t-shirts have stamped on them these days. I've seen these men: skinny, lanky men, wispy even. It is as though our money is stained yet we have no voice.
Brothers!
We must speak as one. Join me now to fight the tyrany of these coddlers of the corpulent, these pamperers of the portly, these indulgers of the inhumanly big! They subserviently change their tallies for the tall and the tubby, and yet they spurn the business of the slim and the slight! We say they can't have it both ways! We say we can no longer be the average when it suits science, while being the extra-small when it suits suits. We can no longer abide the slights of this...this obesity-industrial complex! React! Rebel! Revolt!
Or we could just go for coffee. Either way we can meet for sandwiches at Ben's Deli on 38th and 7th but I can't be out too late (my wife, she worries). Or bring a sack lunch why don't you, we might eat outside if it's nice. And a beverage maybe? Whatever.
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