Nine months ago, I bought these shirts: “H2H Men’s Wrinkle Free Slim Fit Dress Shirts with Solid Long Sleeve White, US XL (Asia XXL)”
He noticed an odd pattern. In that first batch of 30, the shirts fit best on testers who were Caucasians. They seemed to fit worse, in a predictable way, on people who weren’t Caucasian. All subjects of one ancestry — Asian, say — seemed to require the same general alterations. Skerritt noted the anomaly and added a question on what he called “ethnicity”: Asian, Black, Caucasian, Hispanic, or “I’m not sure.” The question, Skerritt says, has proven invaluable to sizing his customers’ shirts.
There’s no denying the satisfaction of a smartly tailored shirt. But with this one question, the once mundane world of dress shirts is now dabbling in a kind of racial profiling. Are we ready to dredge up centuries of racial strife, simply for a perfect fit?
* I just bought a cotton sweater at Brooks Brothers in Manchester VT that was labeled, as I recall, “Size L (XL Asian).”
* There is no such thing as a race in terms of being able to absolutely delineate the boundaries of a race,but it is generally true that black men and women have broader shoulders and smaller calves (not always, but generally), different shaped buttocks, and so on, so if people describe themselves as black, white, or Asian, it is likely that after making adjustments for age and body mass index, you might be able to make clothes that fit more people better.
If you go to the Caribbean, you will see that mannekins in store windows have more protruding buttocks than they do on the mainland US, and this is probably because the average customer there has a similar anatomical deviation.
* Ian Fleming has a bit in You Only Live Twice where he comments on how the Japanese have absurdly small buttocks.
If you are into women who are caudally equipped, stay clear of East Asia….
* I remember shopping at a hipster store in Echo Park, Los Angeles, a few years back that only carried Japanese clothing brands. I generally wear American size “Large” shirts, but I am by no means a “big guy”. I was impressed by the clothing, but I looked like Lou Ferrigno turning green in even the XXL sizes. I mentioned to the sales clerk that while I admired the clothing, everything simply ran too small. The clerk sighed, “Yeah, that’s kind of a problem.” The shop was out of business within a year.
I have noticed that Scandinavian clothing brands seem to fit me extremely well and I generally seek them out whenever I can.
I have a few Japanese clients and when they visit New York they hilariously and somewhat inappropriately overreact to the size of some of the African Americans they encounter.
* Next year’s Best Picture will go to either 12 Years In A Fitting Room, in which Solomon Northup is micro-aggressed by a racially profiling tailor and has to relive the anguish of his slavery, and Django Unfitted, in which Django gorily rights a century of sartorial injustice.
The good thing is black actors will receive the 100% of Oscar nods they deserve. Other minorities will be snubbed with the customary lack of media interest.
* I am about 6’1″ and 180 lbs. In Asia I have to buy XL clothes because Asian L is way too small for me.
* There are ideas, true and false, that cannot be aired publicly in America without placing yourself beyond the pale of intellectual discussion. These ideas are more often anathematized than argued against.
I wonder if our esteemed host would be interested in hosting an Index of Heresies.
I compiled this list, but I’m sure that there are some that I have not noticed. Obviously, some of these contradict others, but all of the ideas, if expressed, will run you out of polite society. This has gone on long enough that impolite society is now a sizable political force.
US has too many Mexicans
US has too many Muslims
There is something wrong with gay people.
There is something wrong with transgender people.
Blacks on average are less intelligent than whites.
Blacks are subhuman near-animals.
God created man and woman, separate from the animal kingdom, and has particular views about sexual morality.
Evolution did not stop with the Neolithic Revolution, and there are significant biological differences between racial groups.
Jews have too much power.
There is a Jewish conspiracy to bring down white/Western/Christian civilization
The Geneva Conventions are too restrictive, and the US would be better off going back to the practices of Sherman and Sheridan and Truman and LeMay.
Our criminal justice system, on the whole, produced more order and more justice in 1950 than it does today.
Slavery had benefits for black slaves.
Free trade will not make most Americans better off.
Women are not particularly rational beings, following instead their genetic programming to seek the seed of the kind of uncaring asshole who would succeed in a state of nature.
The common law jury trial system is a bad system, neither reliably identifying the guilty nor safeguarding the innocent.
The American creed of racial equality, encoded in the Declaration of Independence, is fundamentally mistaken.
Things that are not heresies
Anything about foreign policy. You can be Noam Chomsky on US foreign policy, or Paul Wolfowitz, or Ted Cruz and call for carpet bombing ISIS; and your ideas will still be analyzed, debated and attacked and defended as ideas with merits and demerits–not rejected as the ravings of a nonperson.
