The merch company got back to me and apparently there may be a misprint – they’ve measured their XL and it’s actually a 38″ bust – which still isn’t exactly enormous! That’s the biggest size available from their current supplier – but they’ve said they might be able to find an alternative one for me the next time they do a print one. So 10/10 for customer service – even if it doesn’t actually solve the body image problem!

I have just had Tom point out it is a very very small world – though it was Jo who pointed me at your article in the first place – for which thanks.

I have wondered if it’s to do with ‘indie’ / hipster culture being supposedly about the ‘alternative’, and the ‘alternative’ somehow being something to do with being the kids at school without boobs and sex appeal.. but then you overcome that and make it into a strength because you’re, like, HOT in the alternative world. Sort of like the whole narrative about Erin O’Connor and a lot of those ‘strange’ looking ‘dorky girl’ supermodels. But then that in turn becomes a kind of reverse snobbery. Which is ridiculous anyway because fashion has long idolised those ‘dorky’ girls, mainly because they also happen to look rather good in couture.

Another idea: maybe it’s just that extensive amounts of recreational drugs are a very effective weight-loss aid.

It drives me crazy. When you’re older you generally get a bit of perspective I find, and also you realise the time cost involved in all the UPKEEP and say sod that. But definitely when I was a teenager I was thinking I ought to look like Shirley Manson or Louise Wener, and I doubt they were even very photoshopped back then, must be worse now.

Hooray for writing to them though! I grumbled at B&S on twitter about it the other day but haven’t done anything else, I should write to them and the merch company too, great idea.

The thing is that I’m sure it wasn’t ever thus – it seems to have become more prevalent as ‘indie’ has moved closer to the mainstream, abandoning a lot of what was liberating or empowering about its subcultural status and simply absorbing mainstream mores. As a 90s kid, I remember a whole host of women in early Britpop and UK indie who, while not being actively touted as Positive Female Role Models, nevertheless presented themselves as confident and secure in their unconventional looks, build and dress. Off the top of my head, there was Kenickie, Manda Rin, Cerys Matthews, Shampoo, Echobelly, Elastica, to say nothing of riot grrl – and it seemed as though their looks were accordingly given much less attention. Admittedly I’m more distant from contemporary alt/indie, but it doesn’t seem like that’s the case anymore – female indie artists, regardless of how edgily they’re packaged, seem more or less identikit right now, and far more packaged and produced – with a related impetus towards the widest mainstream aesthetic appeal. Even with someone like Beth Ditto, her distance from the norm was so exceptional that it ended up becoming a fetish in itself. I don’t know how much of this is female-specific and how much just a function of a subculture increasingly becoming as bland and homogenised as the mainstream.

I’ve mailed them and asked if it’s a misprint – I fear not of course, but I shall see what they say!

Thank you! :-) It’s all been said before but I thought it was worth saying again.

Me too. It saddens me that being different has been hijacked by folk looking to create a scene with very similar principles that many ‘alternatives’ were trying to avoid in mainstream culture to begin with. Exclusivity and superficial ness being the most blatantly obvious of those principles.

A couple of years ago, I walked into a vintage shop and when I asked about a pair of shorts I liked, I was told very rudely “I can look, but I know we won’t stock anything above a 30 inch waist”.

But as Kat says below, it’s not just size. Colour, hair cut and taste in socks all seem to be persecuting factors.