Fashion website Wish.com has come under fire for advertising their plus-sized tights with pictures that show standard-sized models fitting their entire bodies into one pair, with the tights stretched up to their heads.
The company has drawn ire for using poor tactics to market to plus-sized customers – something plus-sized customers are not super used to because the fashion industry is always ready and willing to accommodate us. No really, I promise.
Yes, I am outraged. It’s ridiculous. Absolutely absurd! The anger is real, and it is palpable, because what Wish.com is selling us is a dangerous falsehood.
Source: Wish.com
And here’s why: any idiot knows the minute you stretch a pair of tights past your knees, over your thighs, around your butt, up to your waist – they are 100 per cent guaranteed to get a ladder.
No one ever, not in the whole history of putting on a pair of tights for the first time, has been able to pull them all the way up without getting a run. No one. No, not you either, be honest. To pretend otherwise is just pure fantasy.
Do not spin me this fairytale, Wish.com. I’m through the looking glass; I’ve removed my rose-coloured specs. I have peered past the curtain, and I know the truth.
Don’t tell me about that one time you bought $45 tights from David Jones, and you put them on and they were perfectly fine. Or that other time, when you put a tiny hole in the knee of your favourite beige pair and then patched it up with clear nail polish, and the tights lasted forever.
Please, I cannot be lied to like this anymore.
Don’t get me wrong, as a woman of heft I love nothing more than to have clothing sold to me on a “per thin person” basis. As any fashionista knows, while sizes 6-14 are measured in centimetres, anything above is classified by: how many models will fit inside this one comically large garment.
When I pull on a pair of jeans, it helps to imagine two cheeky lil' models peeking out above the waistband, grinning thinly, one in each leg hole. If I can see six pairs of svelte and perky model breasts fitting the chest-width of a dress I’m considering, I know it’s for me and my heavy boobs.
Simply put, there’s no easier way for me to know I’m choosing the right clothing.
I mean, come on. As any person advertising to the critically underserved plus-size market knows, I am a human woman so large I’ve actually been erased from my own clothing and replaced by a thin lass in slinky underwear, stretching my tights all the way up past her top knot.
So, you know, that part is fine. By all means, stick a size 6 girl in my size 20 denim shorts, and have her pull the waistband way out like an after-shot in an advertisement for Fat Blaster protein powder.
But please, Wish.com, do not sell me a fool’s dream of ladderless tights. That is a pain too great to bear.
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