This is a great observation. You hear men claiming that men in general are gross and disgusting in all sorts of contexts, including the always-hilarious, “I’m a straight guy; I swear I go blind when I look at another man and thus am completely incapable of determining whether he is physically attractive or not.” Y’all need to love yourselves more and quit being so afraid of being “accused” of being gay.
Then there’s the ever-ambiguous “too much skin vs. not enough skin” and “too tight vs. too baggy” lines girls and women have to negotiate in school, work, and leisure time. I’ve given up wearing shorts entirely, because I can never find a pair that is the precise level of form-fittedness and length that I’m comfortable with, and then I get grief from the strangest people (coworkers? aunts? why the hell do they care?) for wearing long pants in the summer.
Do we know any parent who ever said, "You know, I sure wish I could buy some shorts for my daughter that are an inch shy of being crotchless, and splashes the word “Juicy” across her ass? No.
The problem with fashion is that it’s ass backward. Instead of the consumers demanding a product that the designers deliver to them, the designers create a new-and-different product and attempt to foist their fabricated (ha! pun!) trends upon the consumer. And I agree that the super-short, super-fitted trend for girls is pretty awful in that it only looks good on 10% of the population. For the other 90% of the population, it misses the mark. It’s not necessarily that it looks too sexual as much as it looks godawful.
The unfortunate result is that girls/women are either embracing a trend that is completely inappropriate for their body type and/or age (I mean, what could be more attractive than a tattooed roll of fat hanging out?) OR they’ve quit buying clothes altogether.
I’m honestly amazed at how difficult it is to buy “staples” anymore, like a decent fitting t-shirt or a pair of jeans. Manufacturers seem to believe that using stretchy fabric is the answer to sizing, and it’s not. If you have an ounce of body fat, lycra will expose it. And the result is muffin tops, panty lines and bra lines. Blech! (Hint to manufacturers: Abandon the lycra and cut the fabric wider, so that the fabric isn’t clinging to the body.)
Not that exactly, but I did know a couple in the '90s who did similar things , like continue to have her daughter wear the uniform skirt bought in 5th grade until 8th grade when she was much taller and the skirt barely covered her underwear and the one who bought her grade-school daughter low-cut shirts claiming she couldn’t find anything else in her daughter’s size although the rest of us were able to find regular T shirt styles for both ourselves and our daughters. And my sister-in-law, who bought her daughter shorts with “Juicy” across the ass at the very same time I was buying my similarly-sized daughter shorts with no writing across the ass.* It’s possible that now there aren’t any other choices ( I wouldn’t know, not having bought children’s clothes in a while) but back then , there were options and people *still *chose clothing for their children that others would think was inappropriate
*And I was buying them in a cheap store, possibly the same one in downtown Brooklyn that Saintly Loser referred to earlier. It’s not like I was buying expensive clothes- this place was cheaper than Target.