24. Merchandise Lost

Unisex? More like unisux.

Trigger Warning: This post contains discussions of anti-fat bias, diet culture, and disordered eating. Please protect your mental health and use discretion in whether or how to engage with this content.

As I’ve aged, I’ve tried to train myself to care less about the amount of space my body physically takes up in a world that only encourages women to take up less space, physically and metaphysically. I try not to care about what size the labels on my clothes read. Realistically, I know they’re all made up and don’t really indicate how clothes will fit me. However, again being raised in a world where smaller equals more valuable and desirable, I still care, even though I hate that I care. As someone who also has a history of disordered eating, I have to be extra careful not to let inconsistent sizing send me into a shame spiral that awakens all of my disordered eating habits.

It does get easier to care less about your physical size as you get older, in large part because society is taught that women are their most valuable when they’re young. In the United States, our current political climate enables people to debate my worth in society as a middle-aged, child-free woman. Should I have fewer voting rights? What purpose do I serve if I am not forced into birthing drones for the capitalist machine? 

ANYWAY. 

Being aware of all of this still didn’t help my ego when I started my job at a brewery and headed to the merch section of the taproom to buy some brewery-branded shirts to wear for work. Although I wasn’t required to wear brewery-branded shirts at work, it was an unspoken understanding that all employees should be wearing some brewery merch some of the time. While I was standing in front of the t-shirts, a host came over to chat. 

“So all the women’s shirts are toddler-sized. I recommend the unisex shirts instead.”

Somewhat skeptical, I headed to the women’s shirts anyway and found a t-shirt labeled extra large. Holding it up, it did indeed seem toddler-sized. How on earth would anyone think this was an XL? Truly, in other situations, I think this shirt would be labeled a medium. A kind of small medium at that. If I wanted a shirt with a femme cut, not a boxy unisex shirt, I had to buy a 2XL. Even a 2XL shirt was on the verge of being too tight. If I wanted to wear it, I had to do the thing where you stretch out under each arm so it would fit across my chest and then stretch out the hem so it wouldn’t cling to my stomach. And even then it was still uncomfortably tight so I wore it very rarely. I also dejectedly purchased a unisex shirt (in a large) even though I knew it would be unflattering in a different way. Gotta wear brewery gear, right?

Deciding on and ordering brewery merchandise fell to my manager in the marketing department. One day, shortly after resigning myself to the presence of a 2XL shirt in my wardrobe, I brought up the sizing on the women’s shirts to him. He assured me that he had “several women” try on different shirts in different cuts from different vendors and that the shirts he ordered were the best option. Thinking of the femme cut, soft fabric t-shirts and flowy tank tops I had purchased at other breweries, I knew this wasn’t the case.

This model doesn’t look particularly jazzed but look at the femme cut shirt!

 I continued to bring up the ridiculous sizing of the shirts and learned that the “several women” he asked to try on shirts were a handful of the young front-of-house staff. Almost everyone is thin and hot when they’re young without really trying all that hard, and the staff at the time was no exception.

As time went on, I realized that the decision to purchase these shirts in these sizes with these cuts was deliberate. The kind of women the brewery wanted to be wearing their merch were the kind of women who could fit into artificially small shirts. A woman my size (which is about average for women in the United States) was never intended to be a walking billboard for the company, although my body shape and size were arguably more representative of most of our customers. 

If I couldn’t fit into the tiny-sized women’s shirts, then I was relegated to the shapeless, stiff unisex t-shirts made of material that felt an inch thick. The kinds of branded shirts you order as an afterthought. Or maybe hand out at events. 

Since I wasn’t a sexy baby, I deserved to be an amorphous blob.

This sent a very clear message to me: the issue wasn’t with the cut or sizing of the selected shirts. The issue was the size of my body - I was too big for the shirts. Being too big to fit into the shirts was a moral failing on my part. If I wanted to wear a women’s shirt from my brewery, I needed to fit into the sizes they deemed appropriate for women.

When I tell this story to other women in the industry, I am met with stories of similar frustrations. Women wanting to rep their brewery as part of their job or as a fan are unable to find femme cut shirts in their size. One friend shared that she told her brewery that, if they wanted her to rep their brand during television appearances and festivals, then they needed to start selling better options for women. All of us, it seemed, were fed up with having to choose between too-small women’s shirts or unflattering unisex shirts.

Perhaps tellingly, I couldn’t even find a picture of a woman in a unisex shirt on any of the merch websites I looked at

So let’s talk a little bit about clothing and sizing. If you are a man, this conversation may be new to you as men have to worry very little about it. Up until the late 19th century, all clothing was handmade and fairly androgynous. Until a certain point, clothing wasn’t just handmade - the fabric had to be woven, the thread had to be created, etc. Hence, most people wore loose, pretty sack-like clothing. 

War sparks innovation, so when Napoleon needed more men to fight as soldiers, they needed to find a way to mass produce a lot of uniforms. Eventually, it was figured out that you could roughly figure out a man’s measurements by measuring his chest. Making lots of uniforms was pretty easy when you could standardize sizing that fit well enough. The US military modified the approaches, particularly during World War I, and what we know as standard men’s sizing remains pretty much unchanged to this day. 

Trying to standardize women’s sizing is a much more difficult task because boobs, hips, thighs, butts, and hormones all play a role in getting clothes to fit. Having a woman’s chest measurement tells you nothing about the proportions of her body. When ready-to-wear clothing became available, manufacturers tried to standardize women’s sizing. The result was that women returned poorly fit clothing in droves. For a while, women’s clothes were sold 75% completed so women could tailor the clothes to their bodies themselves. Other systems have been attempted in the past and it seems like sometime in the 1970s, everyone just gave up on the idea. Since then, manufacturers have been able to make up their sizes based on whatever they want. Therefore, there is no consistency in women’s clothing sizing. I may be a 14 in one brand, an 8 in another, and an 18 in another. Sometimes the sizing isn’t even consistent within the same brand.

Somewhere along the line, someone decided that unisex-sized shirts could be the answer to clothing women. I can promise you this person was not a woman. Unisex shirts are, by definition, meant to be worn by a man or a woman.

And yet.

Unisex sizing is still based on men’s measurements. Unisex shirts typically have a slightly wider body and sleeve than men’s shirts. Femme-cut shirts often have more stretch and are more form-fitting. They’re also usually cut for a tighter fit and have shorter sleeves than men’s shirts. 

You may be asking yourself how a unisex t-shirt is “unisex” for women when its cut is not only based on men’s sizing but also has a wider body and sleeve than even a man’s shirt, let alone a woman’s shirt.

Welcome to the club. Unisex shirts are not made with women in mind and do not typically fit femme bodies well. If your merch is limited to unisex shirts for women, you need to do a better job of sourcing merchandise. Even if it drives your price point up a bit.¹ While I’m not representative of all women, I will pay a little more to be able to wear brewery merch cut for my body that I feel good in. Please let me pay you money to turn myself into a walking billboard for your brewery. 

If my options are toddler-sized women’s shirts or bulky unisex shirts, guess what? I’m taking my bonus third option, which is not buying any merch at all.²

The Power of Routine

This week, I participated in the administration of the Master Cicerone exam. It was a little surreal being on the administration side and not the candidate side. I had no nerves, slept pretty well, and actually got to eat my lunch both days of the exam.³ Being more of an observer of the exam reminded me of a skill I’ve developed over the years and encouraged others to do as well.

Ya gotta have a routine.

By that, I mean you should develop a routine that you perform at the beginning of each tasting session, whether it’s doing practice tasting panels at home, taking an exam, or judging a flight of beers. Create a ritual that helps you calm your nerves, focus your mind, and signal to your brain that it’s time to taste mindfully.

Creating routines is beneficial in a lot of ways for humans. When it comes to tasting sessions, having a routine is no less beneficial. First, performing your routine signals to your brain and body that you are about to mindfully taste beer, usually with a specific goal in mind. This not only helps you focus on what you’re doing, but it also keeps you from being distracted by external things in your environment. I’ve been in plenty of testing and judging environments that have been noisy or had random loud noises like kegs being dropped or delivery people Kool-Aid Manning through the room.

I’ve also been in plenty of environments where the people around me are irritating by doing things like bouncing their knees, tapping their pens, or clearing their sinuses repeatedly. If you have an established routine to begin your sensory sessions, then it’s much easier to focus faster, better, and longer. Unexpected noises, bodily or otherwise, won’t jolt you out of your concentration. This is particularly important during high-pressure times like exams.

Your routine should also help reduce tension and anxiety. If you take a few seconds to unclench your jaw, relax your shoulders, and loosen up your neck, you’re already releasing anxiety physically from your body. If you use breathing techniques like alternate-nostril breathing, you can reduce your stress and anxiety as well as improve your brain function.

For me, I view my pre-tasting session routine as almost a religious exercise. It’s a moment I take for myself to quiet everything around me, focus on relaxing my body, and encourage myself to trust the process.

Using the Master Cicerone exam as an example, I can tell myself that I may not know exactly what is going to be on, say, an off flavor panel, but I do know what my options will be and I also know that I won’t be tasting anything for the first time. Doing that little pep talk in conjunction with physically relaxing as much tension as I can and doing some alternate-nostril breathing has had a significant positive impact on my mental state going into tasting exams. When the timer starts, I’m much calmer, with a clearer mind and a more confident approach.

Establishing a routine does not have to be a lot of work and it doesn’t have to be intricate. In fact, I would encourage you to focus on creating a routine that you can perform while sitting in a chair that won’t make you feel self-conscious or disturb people around you. You don’t need a lucky troll doll or to wear the same pair of underwear every time - although if those things help you go bananas. You can develop your routine over time and change it if you find that something about it isn’t helpful for you any longer.

And finally…

Before we leave each other, here are a few more things I am up to these days:

1. Judging at the Great American Beer Festival. If judging in a professional competition is a goal of yours, go ahead and apply. Don’t talk yourself out of it because you feel like you don’t have enough experience or are too intimidated. The beer judging world needs you and I’ve sat across the table from plenty of dudes who got their seats at the table by simply existing as dudes who work in a brewery.

2. Reading Sticky: The Secret Science of Surfaces by Laura Winkless. I’ve started a fun (for me) habit of browsing through a bookstore IRL with no real goal in mind other than picking out books that seem interesting to me. Which is the purpose of bookstores, I get it, but I typically order books online and usually purchase books for specific reasons or interests. I never really thought that much about surfaces until I saw this book and suddenly all I wanted to learn about was surfaces.

3. Listening to “Empire City: The Untold Origin Story of the NYPD.” This is a fairly new podcast, so you can get caught up pretty quickly. “Empire City” traces the roots of police work from slavery (police in the US originated as slave patrols) to police gangs and more, focusing on the New York City Police Department, which is the largest police force in the world. So far, it’s super informative and a good reminder that “history” doesn’t always happen that long ago.

1. Which is SO STUPID because why do we need to pay more money for less material?!?

2. I acknowledge that this topic isn’t as heady as a lot of our topics are, but shit’s rough out there for a lot of people right now. I chose a topic with significance but perhaps not as much heaviness as some other topics.

3. You are a better taster when you’re hungry because your senses are heightened. Thus, I often ended each day of the Master Cicerone exam eating ravenously because I didn’t eat breakfast or lunch ahead of the tasting panels.