A modest proposal: dial all dress sizes up in one day

“That girl’s thigh is as big as my arm – in happier times,” I said, nudging my fashion friend, with whom I’ve had spirited conversations with regarding fashion’s predilection for the painfully thin over the years.

“Look at the clothes,” she hissed back. “Stop obsessing.” 

But I couldn’t stop. My attention had moved up to the models’ arms, spider-like appendages of bone with a translucent thin coating of skin emerging from sharp, protruding collarbones. 

“Really, what is attractive about an arm that looks like a half-sucked chicken wing?” I asked. “And how am I, as a happy size 12, supposed to want that dress when it has clearly been designed for a shape that belongs in a food queue in Eritrea?”

“The models are thin because clothes look better when there are no bulges to distract from the drape,” my friend snapped back, now clearly irritated.

I decided to push my luck. “What do you mean by bulges? Are you referring to breasts, thighs, tummies, and hips - actual body flesh? I thought the intention of these clothes is that they end up on the backs of real women. Are we supposed to be mere walking spines so as not to ruffle jacket lines?”

When I received no further comment from my purse-lipped colleague, I amused myself by looking across the runway to the celebrities posed in the front row opposite, hiding behind their over-sized sunglasses.

If it wasn’t for those shades and the liberal injections of Botox that rendered their faces shiny death masks incapable of movement, I am sure they would have been grimacing at the sight before them.

And there’s good reason why. Those teeny, tiny little dresses that looked like they would struggle to fit Barbie, Skipper and co are the very same gowns these women’s’ stylists send them to wear on the red carpet.

Which means, somehow, they too have to slim down to today’s sample size which, judging from the human twigs bucking under the weight of their disproportionate heads on the catwalk, will entail not only giving up carbs but the entire food pyramid for the foreseeable future.

Since actors have become the new couture clotheshorses, they are expected to be the same size as those pained genetic freak models who still have to starve themselves to fit couture. And, as sample dress sizes today more resemble glove sizes of the past, this means actors too must fit the size 0 ideal designers insist upon.

Which is ridiculous when you consider that fashion is an industry which is based on selling clothes to women, yet the very creators of these garments refuse to acknowledge that the majority of the female population is size 12 plus – and rapidly expanding. It’s as though these people trying to sabotage their own businesses - that or they need a good feed to get their brains going because the situation is nonsensical.

While it would be easy to accuse such designers of being plain cruel and stupid, I decided a better plan is to leave them alone and attack the real dummies of the business instead. Yes, I’m talking about the mannequins on which the designers drape and shape fabric and measure patterns on, setting the sizes of their garments and, as such, how we label our own bodies.

What I decided was to propose a global revolution and nominate a day – let’s call it Dummy Spit Day - where every designer, manufacturer, student, pattern-maker and amateur sewer takes their mannequins, grabs hold of those miraculous knobs that make butts, chests, waists and hips expand with a simple twiddle and start turning with abandon – 10cms on each dial at least.

The tagged sizes on these more generous garments could remain the same, meaning every woman would wake to find they have dropped a dress size overnight. Forget about stimulus payments, women would be literally dancing in the streets, skipping their way to boutiques to buy up big, with a stop at Krispy Krème along the way.

Think about those whippets of the runway, no doubt smoking furiously as I type trying to assuage appetites bereft of the delights of anything with an actual calorie content. These sisters could go forth and eat. They may even begin to menstruate again because the sad fact is many are so thin they don’t.

Actresses could once again resemble the real women they attempt to depict on film – women that eat eggs with yokes intact and don’t travel with a personal trainer and chef to keep on the straight but more importantly narrow.

The world would really be a happier place. Countries that produce textiles could expect a profit surge from all that extra material being used to cover rounder bottoms and full, womanly breasts. And women who wish to enjoy fashion could once again resemble the figures of lust men admire rather than the androgynous coat hangers designers prefer so their pieces “drape without distraction”.

Designer dummies of the world, prepare to have your horizons widened. That, or have your businesses starve along with the models you continue to torture.