Vanity

I must say I've not noticed any confusion between size and fit. (The writer seems to be talking about as if it means cut.) That would seem harder to do that to get it right. i.e. about something being either too big or too small to fit on your body. 

When we mix up size and fit, we expect mass-produced garments to fit our bodies perfectly, and get angry or upset when they don’t.

Nope. We get sad when we can't find clothes to wear and spend years of our lives looking at accessories. Simples.

The mainstream media only make the confusion worse.

 There's no confusion. Stuff isn't available in the breadth of sizing and style people want.

We regularly hear that skinny models promote eating disorders while plus-size models worsen an "obesity crisis". We hear a lot about the deceptive practice of "vanity sizing" and the need for standardised clothing sizes.

That's a differing mix of threads, coming from different quarters; using bodies as narrative, thin bodies=anorexia has been advanced by certain women who aspire to that size and wish to disassociate both from that desire and its negative fallout. Especially when its on their offspring. The plus size/ 'obesity' nonsense is a play on that from silly fat haters. And vanity sizing......

There’s no such thing as "vanity sizing". Instead, clothing brands arrange their sizing to minimise their costs and appeal to the majority of their customers. They make relatively few of the smallest and largest sizes in their ranges, because the medium size always sells best.

The majority of their customers are the ones they arrange their sizing around. So this is faking argument via tautology. Yet;

In turn, the brand will revise its sizing so that the most popular size is again the medium size.

That's the basis of vanity sizing. If it wasn't vanity, they'd just make more of their biggest selling size. She then goes on;

A decade ago, Rip Curl revised its women’s sizing after measuring its female customers aged 12-24. Its sales leapt by 86% the following year.

86%?!!! How so if they just make clothes for their customers? Why's she denying this phenomena? I've been told my whole life by size 10's that if they keep not being able to fit into what they see as their definitive size, they won't go a size up. Perhaps she has an different metaphysical frame unavailable to the rest of us (tee hee, I can talk!)

Though predictably demented brain scramble of fat hating makes people blame this on fat people. Like shouting at fat people for the AMA's recent decision, as we are assumed to be in agreement.

Vanity sizing is about this surprisingly tenacious sense of identity. And as the clothing industry revolves around this, there's a palpable loss of sales when the identity or "vanity" 'boycott' reaches a critical mass. Its deemed vain presumably because its seen about not accepting you're fatter, rather than how you define yourself. Even though, I've yet to know of a fat woman who's won't size up if she can get something she likes to actually wear. 

Too many of us are still have the feeling of just finding stuff that fits and appreciating that. As opposed to the joy of liking stuff and finding they have our size. I know vanity sizing exists because I monitored my size-measurements quite closely, in the past. I know I went up to size 22 by measurement. Yet when I finally had cash to buy some new threads. I was a consistent size 20.

At first I thought, maybe I'd held the tape a bit too loosely when measuring myself. It took me a bit to figure what was going on. This identity crisis is indicative of the mentality and attitude at the heart of the 'obesity epidemic'. Clinging to a sense of self, feeling "swamped" by the prospect of what's deemed foreign. The whole thrust of the crusade is for fatz is nominally, to become slim. Or preferably, angle ones life around aiming to.

I suppose you could call that a biological opportunity, rather like between races, sexes and sexualities.

Having lots of people try to be and fail does something to the perception value of slimness, to all concerned. Not trying to be slim offends for that reason. In and of itself, weight is pretty meaningless. Or at least, its differences are far more subtle and obscure than some want them to be.