When in the course of clothing purchasing, it becomes necessary for the shopper to reject the fashion paradigms that are overrunning the earth, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the reasons for this separation.
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that these clothes are designed for someone who recently escaped from the Planet of the Barbies, or at least the Planet of Genetically Cloned Women With Certain Proportions. I seem to have missed out on the cloning memo, there.
This failure at cloned feminine proportions has caused me no end of trouble throughout my life. While it's true that I am 5'3" tall, I am indeed a grown woman who wears size 16 (occasionally 14) pants. However, it seems that (like the rides at amusement parks) you must be a certain height to wear size 14 and size 16 pants -- including the ones marked "short." By this logic, any female who is over 5'5" tall is therefore a woman, no matter what her age, and I'm obviously a fat pre-teen.
Other size issues brand me as a not-a-woman. I have small feet, like my mother, who was (during the 1930-1980 era) able to find shoes that fit a size 4 1/2 foot. Sometime during the post-1995 era we were moved into the Universe Of Much Bigger People and now my shoe size lets me only choose between Glitter Princess Girly Shoes (size 5) and Shaq sneakers (also size 5.) I usually go for Shaq, because "Glitter Princess" shoes aren't really made for field biology (snakes view them with alarm... and I'm speaking from experience, here.)
People seem to be getting larger these days. At this rate, we can also conclude that I am never, EVER going to get out of puberty and may (as I age and my cartilage shrinks and my height diminishes) actually end up a child again. I might get "carded" when I buy liquor, simply because of my height. I can just see the clerk explaining, "Yes, I see that you do indeed have gray hair and wrinkles -- but some people have difficult childhoods and I want to see proof of age or you can't have that nice bottle of Chardonnay."
Interestingly enough, MEN don't seem to have this height-ism.
I discovered this during my last frustrated errand to Sears in search of a pair of khaki pants that were going to stand up to trotting through scrub brush. Blue jeans are out since the "uniform" for the Audubon centers where I volunteer is khaki/brown/tan pants. My husband has these lovely khaki Dockers that I lust after (when I'm not lusting after parts of his body -- which is entirely Too Much Information, I know) -- sturdy and decorated with enough pockets to hold standard field investigation gear. The store had a large number of different styles of pants, but these were all for standing around the office drinking coffee or for wearing while laboring at your vegetable garden. They'd have folded like a bad poker hand the moment I stepped off the beaten path and into the unbeaten brush.
In a moment of frustration, I wandered over to the men's department where I discovered much to my surprise that men come in a variety of sizes and shapes and that pants with a 29-30 inch inseam and a 34 inch waistline actually fit -- no hemming needed. In fact, the fashion industry has pants in all sorts of lengths for all sorts of waistlines -- including men with inseam length of 29 inches and a waist of 44 inches.
Furthermore, THEIR Dockers (unlike the ones for women) actually have useful pockets. I don't know if you've noticed, but few designers make pants for women with pockets. Even the jeans seem to be constructed from material more suitable for tea parties than for tackling an alligator. Yes, alligators. One of the places I deal with is John Bunker Sands Wetlands and they have alligators and yes I've handled them. Right now they're just 2 feet long, but I promise you they WILL grow.
So I need pants that scoff at "wet and muddy." I want pants you can wear for chasing down snakes and grasshoppers and frogs. I want pants that don't ravel into hysterical little piles of thread at their first (or even third) encounter with catclaw, devil's walking stick, prickly pear, and yucca. I want pants that will hold up during a scramble over a ten foot pile of boulders to go view rock art and can hold car keys, notepad, pens, and maybe a camera or phone or even a tablet computer. I want pants for wrangling alligators.
I am an obvious failure as an example to my gender. I understand that I am to set an example as a woman and to pack everything in tasteful handbags because society will come to an abrupt end if my silhouette has any kind of lumpy areas, but frankly that's not my lifestyle. I have therefore decided to not waste my money on Clothes For Clones when there's perfectly good pants for non-clones over yonder in the men's department -- pants that won't fall apart when I have to drag a kayak out of the pond.
So, clothing designers, I declare myself em-pants-ipated. That's it -- auf wiedersehen and thanks for all the Gestreifte Meerbarbe. I'm shopping over yonder with the Manly Men.