From Esquire, the bastion of sociological knowledge, comes a groundbreaking expose on the clothing industry. Sarcasm aside, Sauer’s examination of the size of waistbands in men’s pants is fairly interesting, if not scientific (as far as I can tell, he measured one pair of pants at each size). His findings:
And his conclusions:
This isn’t the subjective business of mediums, larges and extra-larges — nor is it the murky business of women’s sizes, what with its black-hole size zero. This is science, damnit. Numbers! Should inches be different than miles per hour? Do highway signs make us feel better by informing us that Chicago is but 45 miles away when it’s really 72? Multiplication tables don’t yield to make us feel better about badness at math; why should pants make us feel better about badness at health? Are we all so many emperors with no clothes?
The mind-screw of broken pride aside — like Humpty Dumpty, it cannot be put back together, now that you know the truth — down-waisting is genuine cause for concern. A recent report published in the Archives of Internal Medicine found that men with larger waists were twice at risk of death compared with their smaller-waist peers. Men whose waists measured 47 inches or larger were twice as likely to die. Yet, most men only know their waist size by their pants — so if those pants are up to five inches smaller than the reality, some men may be wrongly dismissing health dangers.
But vanity waist sizing is so entrenched, it couldn’t possibly be changed overnight, at least not without a government mandate. The only solution seems to be a gradual, year-by-year shaving of quarter-inch by quarter-inch until, in 2021, men’s pants finally correspond with the label numbers — conveniently just in time for the New World Order’s switch to mandatory full jumpsuits.
Memoirs of a SLACer 