When body positive blogger Michelle Elman found a dress that she's had since 2012, she decided to put it on for the hell of it — and lo and behold, it still fit, despite the fact that she had gone up in dress size over the last five years.
"The dress is a size 14," she wrote in a post to Instagram. "I bought it 5 years ago when I was a size 12. Now, I'm a size 20. And yet, I still fit it. Which just proves that NUMBERS DON'T MEAN ANYTHING."
Elman wrote that she decided to post the photos of herself wearing the dress, five years apart, to prove that we should never let clothing sizes dictate how we feel about our bodies.
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"Same dress. Still comfortable. Still beautiful," she wrote, adding that "A higher dress size doesn't mean: — you are less beautiful — you are less worthy — you are less lovable — you are a worse human — you are a bad person — you are a different person AND it doesn't even mean you have a bigger body."
While there's nothing wrong with having a "bigger body," clothing labels can often trick us into feeling insecure. As she noted, clothing sizes are often arbitrary, and can vary from store to store or country to country.
Futhermore, in a follow-up post, Elman pointed out that size doesn't dictate how good you look — which is why comments like "you look good for a size 20" aren't a compliment.
"When you say I look good for a size 20, it usually means I look skinnier than a size 20 which still sends the message: thin = good, fat = bad," she wrote. "This perpetuates the idea that fat equals ugly or unattractive which is most definitely DOES NOT!"
The bottom line? Clothing labels are unpredictable, and we can't let them affect the way we feel about our bodies.
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