The Hefty Hideaway

Tags

online shopping, plus size clothes, plus size shopping, Rakuten

My English Club has been obsessed with dancing lately. It started when they said they wanted to learn a simple dance, and I suggested “The Cupid Shuffle” and “The Cha Cha Slide” because it just doesn’t get any easier than dancing to songs that give you directions. They learned these and remixed the Cupid Shuffle quite a bit. They then taught these dances to junior high school students at this year’s Open Campus.

After that came the Halloween party. When the club captain was told that throwing pies at people was out of the question, she turned to me once again for a dance. Of course I suggested the “Thriller” dance, and the club members had a blast “dancing with Michael.”

Now that that’s done, they turned to the next thing: preparing for the next culture festival. Since they want to sing and dance, they figured they’d start practicing early. This time, the inspiration is the 2007 movie Hairspray. Specifically, the song “Welcome to the 60s.”

As this scene takes place in what would now be called a “plus size” store, Mr. Pinky’s Hefty Hideaway, I found myself explaining what “hefty” and “hideaway” meant, and why the store in the movie is called that. I told them that even when I was a growing up department stores tended to put their plus size sections in the back, far from the main entrance, and that there were few shops that sold larger clothes. But even as I said that, I wondered if the club members were getting the impression that now shopping for larger sizes was easy and that being fat wasn’t frowned upon by a lot of people.

Interestingly, this all was going on around the same time I was discovering more of the “big size” specialty shops on Rakuten. The Japanese Amazon is completely useless for plus size clothes, but Rakuten’s specialty shops are well organized and often have detailed sizing AND dimension info per garment in centimeters, not made up vanity sizes that mean who the hell knows what. The only bad thing about these online shops are the models.

Is this really a “big size” specialty shop?

Fashion-wise, the above shop, Gold Japan, is my favorite. A bit pricier than the shop Queen which I had mostly been using before, but the quality of the garments is also higher, so I think it’s worth it. But these models, I think, don’t look like they would be considered “big” even by Japanese standards. Well, some of them seem taller than average, but otherwise too little for the clothes they’re selling. (That is to say, the garments often aren’t even offered in the smaller size the model must be.) It doesn’t bother me that there aren’t plus size brick & mortar shops in Japan; there isn’t a big enough market here for such stores. (No pun intended.) But it is a little disappointing that even online plus size specialty shops use only thin models. Not only because it feels like a slap in the face, but also because then it becomes harder to know if the garment will look the same way on me as it does on the model.

Great piece, but what if you’ve got more sand in your hourglass than the model?

I’ve gotten pretty good at picking the right size by measuring myself, measuring garments I already have that fit me well, and taking into account what fit the garment is supposed to have (e.g., if it’s something that’s meant to be worn big as was extremely popular here back in 2009-2010, I actually order it one size smaller than usual as wearing baggy clothes usually isn’t flattering on a bigger body). But as with the shirt above, it’s harder to tell. If the top of the black part of the shirt ends up at the bust line it can be a good look, but if it’s in the center of the breasts you end up with button nipples.

Sometimes in the shop Queen I’ll find clothing modeled by a woman who looks to be just a wee bit bigger than what’s considered fashionable in Japan–but her face is always cropped out. From what I can see of her face I think it’s the same woman in all the shots where the face is obscured.

Mystery Model

I assume this was done with the model’s permission, if not by specific request. Given the pressure to be thin, especially in Japan, I wouldn’t be surprised if bigger women would be ashamed to publicly model plus size clothes. Then again, who knows, maybe plus size Japanese women prefer to shop with thin models.

From Ashley Stewart’s site, for the sake of comparison. It’s not so hard to sell plus size clothing with plus size models, is it?

おまけ!

An article I came across and the inappropriate ad to the right. *Headkotatsu*

FAIL Mercedes Benz, FAIL

I Can’t Tell If This Is Subversive Or Clueless

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teaching materials

I was cleaning my apartment and I found a copy of the first year students’ post-summer vacation English proficiency test. It included a passage that left me scratching my head:

“In Japanese television programs, we see a commentator at one side of the small screen and an assistant at the other. The commentator is usually male and middle-aged. The assistant is usually female, young and often pretty. He comments on various topics, and she assists. However, she assists so little that, to our eyes, she might as well not be there at all. She only nods at the camera when he makes various statements, and says So desu ne when he makes an important point. She never presents an idea of her own. To many Americans watching these two, the situation might seem strange indeed. We are certainly used to double commentators, but usually each commentator really comments and both are equals. In this common style of Japanese television, the pretty girl seems absolutely unnecessary. We fail to understand her role. Yet she has a very important one.
A commentator is, by definition, giving his opinion. In the West, this is quite enough. In Japan, however, giving an opinion in public makes him appear too self-centered, and this is a fault in a society where unity of opinion is an important value. The attractive, nearly silent, young assistant emphasizes this value. Her nods and expressions of agreement indicate that he is not alone in his opinion and that therefore he is not just self-centered. Rather, he is saying a truth, because at least one person agrees with what he says. At the same time she introduces harmony by indicating that we all agree – after all, she is nodding to us – and the unity of opinion has already been reached.”

By the end of the first paragraph I thought the text was going to focus on why the assistant was usually a pretty young woman, as opposed to another older man, an older woman, or a not so pretty young one. The older man-attractive young woman combo is certainly not unique to Japan; while not as blatant on modern American television, any Hispanic person who has watched the news or infotainment shows on Univision would find the pattern familiar. But instead, the second paragraph focused on how the girl was there to preserve harmony.

I can understand that, but it didn’t erase the question from my mind: why did the author of this passage emphasize so many times that the assistant was a pretty young girl and then completely ignore that point? After all, if the assistant’s role is just to preserve harmony, the assistant’s physical appearance and sex shouldn’t matter; all that’s needed is a nodding head.

Of course, if this is an excerpt from a much longer passage, it’s possible the point was addressed. This passage certainly isn’t from the Reading textbook, so I don’t know where it came from. If the point wasn’t addressed, I’d like to think that the point was at least not lost on the author, and that they were just writing what they could without making waves.