So What, Who Cares (vol 1, issue 19) How some retailers have noticed not every American is a size zero

Ten years ago, I wrote a story about a retail market with the lede:

It's a dilemma for retailers. You want to serve an important and lucrative new customer base, but you don't want to alienate your existing customers. What's the issue that's so sensitive? It's the plus-size clothes shopper.

Last week, the New Yorker ran a piece which shows that the dilemma still hasn't vanished. Although the bulk of the article focused on the thriving plus-size blog and retail scene, one passage stood out for the polite nonrecognition with which mainstream brands regard their sizes 14-24 customers:

At Full Figured Fashion Week, I heard people making reference to the fashion industry’s “closet” plus-size designers: accessible luxury brands with big licensing businesses—including Calvin Klein, Vince Camuto, Ralph Lauren, Tommy Hilfiger, and Michael Kors. All have plus-size lines that are sold in stores like Macy’s but are not advertised.

(Sidebar: Heavier customers are not the only ones from whom the Michael Kors brand is happy to take money while also pretending they don't exist; the New York Times ran a pointed little piece on how the Michael Kors brand basically ignores the non-white, non-rich people who are buying a substantial number of the mid-priced handbags.)

Returning to the main article: retailers are now recognizing that there are plenty of women who are happy in their size 20s, and there's both fashion and profit to be had in that market. In one of the media world's more delightful coincidences, this is also the week the Hollywood Reporter ran an article on vanity sizing and how widely "size 0" -- which is a very recent invention -- varies from brand to brand.

So what? Two points in the article bear noting. First, retailers are now adapting the fast fashion aesthetics and strategies for a plus-size market. Second, class and race politics weigh very heavily in the cultural connotations/baggage around body size and clothing. This is a bit of predictive fancy, but I'm going to guess that since plus-size shoppers are now able to take advantage of the pleasures of fast fashion, it's going to become ever-more-vogueish to declare that fast fashion is bad.

Who cares? If you are a size 14-24, the New Yorker is under the impression that it's easier for you to shop.

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You heard it here first: We have an ambivalent relationship with the memoir genre.

First, cultural critic Hadley Freeman draws a line between the recent positioning of books about a subject (butchery, literature) as actually being about people (Cleaving: A Story of Marriage, Meat, and Obsession by Julie Powell; and The Road to Middlemarch, by Rebecca Mead) and makes the observation that "it is a thin line between the long overdue validation of women’s lives and telling women that the most interesting thing they have to offer, and that all they can be trusted to write about, is themselves."

On the other hand, the power of personal narrative is powerful enough to warp moral judgment and make rotten laws, argues Paul Bloom, who launches into his argument with a broadside against relating to one person's story:

Empathy is narrow; it connects us to particular individuals, real or imagined, but is insensitive to numerical differences and statistical data. As Mother Teresa put it, “If I look at the mass I will never act. If I look at the one, I will.” Laboratory studies find that we really do care more about the one than about the mass, so long as we have personal information about the one.

Personal narrative is also credited with a noticeable, gender-based difference in memory and recall. Girls and women reportedly recall memories more quickly and accurately. Why? Because girls' parents talk to them differently when they are very small: parents of girls are more prone to introduce new snippets of information in conversation, to ask questions about feelings, and to teach (by example) how to frame memories as more-easily-recalled narrative.

(This discovery adds more ammo to the contention that gender-based socialization primes a child's brain to think in one way over another; there was the study earlier this year that showed how the numeracy gap between men and women narrowed when the women in question lived in more developed nations, with fewer restrictions on gender roles, and that follows on a brief media mention last spring positing that the only reason women are good at multitasking is because we've been socialized to be.)

So what? The upshot here is that developing a narrative faculty may be good for our memories, but we have to be careful that a) we don't deprive little boys of the same "how to remember" skills we're teaching little girls, and b) we don't reinforce the publishing-world contention that a women's only value as an author is when she's selling herself.

Who cares? Memoirists, one thinks. Also, it's fascinating to step outside your own brain and try to think about how you were taught to think -- or how you're teaching someone else to think.

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Would you like an example of tailoring your message to a specific audience? Last week, a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, as conducted by Abigail Marsh of Georgetown University, posited that people who are extremely altruistic are biologically hard-wired for extra empathy and compassion, and this trait is on one end of a personality spectrum; at the other end is psychopathy.

The way the study's findings were positioned in the Los Angeles Times? The biological trait "suggests that maybe there are many more people out there who might be interested in donating to a stranger than who actually donate." The Economist's take? "If Dr Marsh is correct, psychopaths and extreme altruists may be the result of similar, rare combinations of genes underpinning the more normal human propensity to be moderately altruistic."

So what? The takeaway -- that some traits are hardwired in our brains and there's a continuum of most to least likely to [whatever] -- is another tic in the "nature" column, versus the "nurture" hypothesis floated in the item above about memory. But to me, another interesting facet is what the writers and editors choose to focus on for their respective publications.

Who cares? Critical readers. It never hurts to have an idea of the editorial approach that is shaping whatever it is you're reading.

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