When Size Matters, and When It Doesn't

This photo makes me so superlatively happy.

It’s the debut of our first adult products - Dragons and Pterosaurs shirts and skirts!  And we are so delighted to release them. Customers have been writing in for years now asking for Princess Awesome adult sizing.  Why why why, customers have asked, did it take you so long?? I answer that it was important to me, as the Chief Creative Officer, to create something that will make the person wearing it feel the things I want to feel when I choose an outfit - confident, powerful, beautiful (yes, beautiful - it’s not whether you look, objectively or objectifyingly  beautiful, but whether you feel beauty and the truth Keats tells us comes with it radiating from within).

I see in this photo all of those things in the women modeling for us. Power, confidence, and beauty: it all radiates from wearing something that reflects one’s interests and tastes, in a size that fits well, wearing a functional, comfortable, well-made piece of clothing.  

We put our models’ heights, weights, and the sizes they’re wearing directly on the photo.  Primarily of course we want you to choose the size that will fit you best. But we have an ulterior motive. We believe that clothes are made for bodies.  We never want a woman to feel that her body is the wrong size or shape for our clothes. And I’m telling you right now, as a person who at some point in her lifetime has worn nearly every size in the range that we produced from 0-2 through 24-26, that it’s the job of the clothing to fit the body.  It is not the body’s job to change or alter to fit the clothes.

And that’s another reason why this picture is so awesome. I want you to see that all of these women look and feel great in the clothes they’re wearing. And they all volunteered to put their personal information on this photo so that you could find the size that will make you feel great too, no matter what size you’re wearing today.  When every photo and image pushes us to feel bad about how we look by contrasting ourselves with others, the women in this photo want you to feel good by comparing yourself to them - see the similarities and not the differences. They want you to see how awesome they look and feel so that you will know that you will also look and feel awesome.

Our models chose to do this because they know that you won’t make a personal value judgment about them for what size they’re wearing or for how much they weigh or how tall or short they are. They know you’re going to see yourself in their photo, and that you’ll feel like you belong there with them. That’s why when this comment came in this morning, I knew that posting our sizing this way was the right thing to do:  

This is just the first set and the first photo.  But it’s the start of a new way of thinking about what it means to design, produce, model, wear, and enjoy the clothing we wear as adults.