I consider myself bisexual, as I like to tell anyone too polite (or drunk) to escape my wit in the pub, because I’ll merrily sleep with both straight and gay women. Hence, as a paragon of sexual tolerance, you’ll believe me when I say things have simply gone too far. And I speak, of course, of the metrosexualisation of men’s sizes.
The signs were there with stores like Officers Club, which seems to want to restrict its clientèle to lithe under-twenties, drug addicts and people with wasting diseases. As a burly (yet enlightened, lesbo-shagging) bloke I would struggle to find anything in there that I could fasten without ripping sounds, and I began to suspect that they had different definitions of “extra” and “large” to the ones I was so intimately familiar with. And, y’know, that would’ve been fine — let the youthful, stick-like fops have their scene and their shops — only now the phenomenon seems to be spreading to the mainstream and, frankly, it couldn’t have come at a worse time.
Honestly, it’s like they’ve done it on purpose: Months of only having the occasional steak bake, of cutting down to a mere three or four sugary coffees a day, of setting aside at least five minutes a week for some actual exercise… my health kick had been going so well (just come with me on that point) and then the retail fraternity had to go and pull the rug out from under my efforts, doubtless with a lot of effected huffing and puffing on their part, by shuffling us all up a notch. YOU’RE NOT FOOLING ANYONE, RETAIL FRATERNITY!
To be fair they aren’t really trying to fool anyone, on the contrary they’re rakishly upfront about it. For example the last time I was in Debs (the store not the lesbian) they had signs up to the effect of “Don’t worry, you’ve not put weight on. We’ve just had a meeting and redefined what obese means. You (sur)prize porker.” Matalan were (even) less kind, the “XL” shirt I picked up being decidedly L-ish yet remaining the largest they stocked, presumably because, whoooeee, who would need XXL, eh? Nobody’s that big!
And that’s why this madness clearly has to stop. Because, left unchecked, the process will eventually see me and my burly blokey brethren unable to find any clothes that fit and having to streak to work five days a week, which nobody wants. You might say it’s an XXL problem, at least until you spot the one part of my anatomy that really is metrosexually sized…
While I’m not a journalist pesky integrity compels me to point out that, despite their sign, my new Debenhams XL shirt feels as big as ever, although that’d be consistent with my weight loss I suppose. Also, Matalan carry inconsistently sized product ranges and some of the stuff I didn’t want to buy was marked XXL, although a fat lot of good that is.