Jeans

Poor Emily had a miserable day at the shops last week, trying to find a pair of jeans that would fit her. After failing to squeeze into countless ridiculous designs, she finally managed to find something at M&S. But why was every single pair at Zara (to name the main offender) tailored for the thinnest, weediest legs imaginable? I'd estimate that about 2% of girls of Emily's age could have fitted into them.

Now it's one thing for the fashion industry to decide that "thin is in" this year for adults (who, after all, can just wear last year's slightly less fashionable styles if they can't find anything to fit them this year), but what are growing kids supposed to do when they can't find a single thing in their size in a store like Zara? And what kind of message does it send them? That they can't be fashionable and won't look good unless they're thin enough to fit into this circulation-stopping gear. All I can hope is that Zara sell so few of them that they realise the error of their ways (because at the end of the day it's all about the bottom line, isn't it?).

Actually, I don't reckon what Emily was trying on were even designed for children. They looked more like they were scaled down from a skinny pair of adult jeans. So what's going on here? Do the buyers or designers at Zara truly not have the brain to realise that children are not miniature versions of grown-ups with exactly the same proportions? Or is this a deliberate tactic to foster feelings of inadequacy among pre-teen girls? Whatever. Thank you Zara for producing such fabulously unwearable clothes that my daughter now has a completely unrealistic idea of what she ought to look like.