This Woman Just Exposed Vanity Sizing In the Best Way

It's no secret that our culture is fixated—often, unhealthily so—on appearance. This obsession with our bodies, and, in particular, thin bodies, means a lot of us spend an unnecessary amount of time and effort trying to look how society tells us we should, often, when we don't even realize it. For example, raise your hand if you've ever gone shopping for jeans and found yourself dismayed at the discovery that you're a size or—gasp!—two sizes larger than you thought. We all have. But as one woman recently proved, sizing means absolutely nothing, so we shouldn't ever be concerned about it.

Deena Shoemaker, a mentor coach who works with at-risk youth, was going through her closet when she noticed her clothes (and her pants in particular) were all different sizes. This struck her as odd, as her body size hadn't changed dramatically in recent years. So she tried them all on, and realized her suspicion was correct: All of the pants fit the same, despite the sometimes six-digit difference in the size on the tag. Knowing how much this apparently meaningless number can affect a person's self confidence, Shoemaker made a photo collage of herself modeling the jeans, to prove size is, as she wrote in the caption, "subjective to the fashion industry's personal taste." Speaking to the Huffington Post, Shoemaker explained,

"I remembered all the times I’ve heard girls say they’re ‘fat’ because they went up a pant size, or talked about all the diets they’ve been on. I’ve tried telling them it’s not true but they never really seemed to believe me. All the pieces fell into place for me when I saw my own pants. The lies they were believing were coming from something so commonplace that they didn’t even recognize it as the source of their hurt.”

---

More on body image:

1. Tess Holliday on “Plus-Size” and Why Models Should Embrace the Term
2. Khloé Kardashian's New Denim Line Just Dropped
3. Coco Cooper: The New Denim Line for Women in Between Plus Size and Sample Size

---

To Shoemaker's surprise, her Facebook post went viral, with 72,000 shares and counting. But, as she explains, that doesn't matter to her; she knows the fashion industry isn't likely to change anytime soon. Her only hope—and her goal in making the collage—is to show the girls in her program, and other teens like them, that their bodies are beautiful just the way they are. "When you've got the fashion industry telling them they're not good enough because they're the wrong size, that's just added stress on top of everything they're already dealing with," she tells the Huffington Post. "They deserve something better than that. They deserve to know their true value."

Take a look at Shoemaker's full post here.

Then, take a look inside Ashley Graham's superorganized bag: