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Woman Wears Six Differently Sized Bottoms to Prove a Point About the Clothing Industry 

Slow clap for Deena Shoemaker. The 27-year-old from Wichita, Kansas, was organizing her closet on Sunday, December 11, when suddenly a lightbulb went off in her head. “I started to notice how dramatically different the size of all my pants were,” Shoemaker wrote in a now-viral Facebook post later that night. “And I have a real problem with the fact that my size 5 pants fit me THE EXACT SAME WAY that my size 12 pants do.”

To prove her point, Shoemaker included photos of herself wearing six different bottoms ranging from size 5 to size 12.

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Shoemaker, who works as a mentor coach for at-risk kids, listens to young women agonize over their weight on a regular basis, which is one of the reasons she felt the need to publicly share her “aha” moment. “Sometimes they’ll arbitrarily make comments like, ‘I’m so fat, I need to go on a diet,’” Shoemaker tells Us Weekly. “One girl told me she hadn’t eaten anything but lettuce for three months. A 5-foot-5 girl said she wanted to be 95 pounds and wouldn’t eat until she made it there.”

Deena Shoemaker
Deena Shoemaker Courtesy of Deena Shoemaker

In her post, Shoemaker notes that she’s at a loss for how to explain inconsistent sizing. “You Photoshop models and actresses and slap them on the front of beauty magazines … I can prove it to girls pretty easily by simply showing them how Photoshop works,” Shoemaker wrote. “But when you resize a girl’s pants from a 9 to a 16 and label it ‘plus size,’ how am I supposed to fight that? … How do you expect me to convince her that she doesn’t need to skip dinner for the next month because her pant size didn’t *actually* go up by seven digits?”

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The church youth leader ended her rant — which has been shared more than 71,000 times — with a powerful message. “And to you; my beautiful girls, my size 2 girls or my size 18 girls, your size doesn’t determine your beauty; your life does,” Shoemaker wrote. “The size printed inside your clothes is subjective to the fashion industry’s personal taste and it fluctuates rapidly. Stop believing the social normative about who and what you should be. You are lovely and you are loved. Just exactly the way you are.”

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