I watched a TV program this morning ... they're talking fitted shirts (pin tucks or darts) tucked in your pants, higher waisted jeans, really high waisted pencil skirts ...

FYI, my Macy's is having a "buy one, get one" free in the clearance department. Really good bargains!

Last fall at Macy's I got a beautiful skirt, marked down from $98 for $9.99! Sure it was fall, and the skirt was spring-ish, but for that price, who cares! Besides, it was a size 6!!!

Hi, my name is Ennay and I am fashion impaired will one of you come visit me and be my personal shopper?

I like new clothes but I find clothes shopping torturous.

Yikes, I did it again! As a result, my wallet decided to break. (No kidding, it really broke, I can't close it any more. Is that an omen? ) Now I'm trying to white-knuckle myself into not buying any more clothes this summer--I need to keep money to register at the university again in September, after all. To think that the next big bargain period is in January... /sigh

That is too funny, Kery! We get sales all the time here, for any occasion: President's Day, back to school, Labor Day. Any excuse for a sale! All we have to do is wait for a week and there's bound to be another one.

Ohh, lucky you. Here the big sales period are only in January/beginning of February, and same again during July and a little bit of the end of June. Stores do sometimes offer discounts at other moments of the year, but it's only on very specific articles, never on all the clothes, for instance.

I'd love to go shopping with ennay! I can always find tons of things that suit my sister when we go together.

Ok ... the shopping ... DH was wonderfully patient
Old Navy was a disappointment. I tried on a pair of 4 sorta skinny legged long shorts. The waist band sat out to here but my thighs were encased! I did get a t-shirt with a contrasting cami for under. If I'd been hunting for jeans and sweaters, I might have been more excited.
Liz Claibourne ... navy, turquoise, white, black, black, black ... smallest size was a six. And a big six!
Mexx ... dreary and expensive. Grey, tan, brown.
Jacob ... a good selection of tanks and t's. A wild variety of colours! Lot's of chocolate in the new for fall stuff. I liked that.
But I didn't LOVE anything.

Hi all!

I'm back from my extreme shopping extravaganza in the big city! It was very intense. I needed to buy new professional clothes to make the transition from waitress to professor (strange, but true) and I think I bought half of Seattle.

Firstly, I agree with the comments about maternity wear-esque clothes. I hate it. I have a very slim waist as well as hip and boob curves, and I want to show it all off. Why on earth would I wear tops that make me look as though I'm trying to hide a triple roll of fat? Frankly, I suspect that the maternity-wear phenomenon is a secret ploy to trick us into breeding more: 'Ooooh, all the shirts look like they'd fit perfectly if I were pregnant, and no one would even be able to see the bump. Best get pregnant then before clothes that fit properly come back into style!'.

I know you guys mentioned the brown thing a few days ago, but I was still really surprised by how much brown there was. It was a bit tricky, because, as I said the other day, all my accessories are really for black and won't work with brown. I did wind up with a few pairs of dress pants that are in the brown family and a pair of cute green shoes that will work with both black and brown, but I don't have any bags/briefcases that will go with brown... The tragic thing is that my coloring really works better with brown than black, but I just don't feel 100% ready to make the commitment to a brown suit, even if it does look really beautiful. Tricky.

I went to Nordstrom for a bra fitting. I think their full service bra thing is totally worth the price of their bras. It's fantastic. The good news is that I have not gone down to a B. I'm a 34C. Still on the small side by my standards, but not too bad. One of the bras I got was even a 34D (cut on the small side, evidently). I've always thought that 34D is the perfect size, so I was pleased.

As for sizes in general, they really were all over the place. Here's the thing, world: a 5'9.5 woman who weighs more than 140lb is NOT a small. Nope. Not small. I am at least a medium sized woman. I'm not fat, I'm not deformed, I'm just medium. And what's more, I don't have a deep psychological need to be a small. I'm 5'9. I'm perfectly happy being medium. It's really, really annoying, and I feel badly for the pixie-women, like Carolyn, who are going to be wearing negative sizes soon so that stores can fulfill what they take to be my need to be "small". It's ridiculous.

It's also a pest. I would wander around a store (Ann Taylor was the biggest culprit here, with Banana Republic a close second) picking up things in Medium and 6. When I get to the changing rooms, I realize that almost nothing fits properly, and I have to go back out to collect Smalls and 4s. It's stupid. How can a woman of my size be a Small/4???? I'm actually between sizes though, so if something was cut on the loose side, I had to buy a small, and if it was slim cut, a medium. This means that I cannot gain a single ounce if I want to keep wearing half my new clothes.

At any rate, I have a ton of new clothes and that's exciting! About half are mediums and 6s and the other half are smalls. I spent about a million dollars and my credit card companies will be rubbing their hands with glee at all my new debt

Baffled, thank you for your shopping report -- I enjoyed reading every word of it.

First, I hear you on brown. I'm just not willing to commit either but it's really seductive because it's everywhere and some of the shades are lovely (rich chocolate versus dirt brown). Sometimes a cordovan/burgundy color shoe/bag/briefcase can work with brown and black.

As for vanity sizing, check out poor Ennay's shopping experiences in our main chat thread. She's now too small for 4's, so what to do? It's crazy, we lose weight, get in shape, and have no selection in clothes any more?

Just like you, I consider myself a normal-sized woman. My BMI is a normal 23.2, not even close to underweight. I'm not bony and certainly don't look the least bit fragile or tiny. My hips are 36" and my waist is 26" - normal measurements, nothing unusually petite. But I'm finding "smalls" and 4's sometimes to be too big on me. So help me figure this out: if an average, normal person like me now wears the smallest size sold, what's a genuinely small person to do? Has the clothing world lost its collective mind? Or is this just brilliant marketing?

You know, with more than 2/3 of adults being overweight or obese, it may just be that clothing for us ends up on the top floor of the store in a special section with limited choices of styles and colors. Just like plus sizes used to be. But there won't be plus sizes any more because everyone will wear regular sizes!!

Anyway, enough ranting about sizes! Congratulations on such a successful shopping trip!

I've started typing about five different responses here ... but upon reflection ... I'm just sad.
Plus size is the new norm and if you work hard to be thin and healthy ... yer odd!

Meg and baffled -- the thing to keep in mind is that nowadays the "average" American is overweight. So being at a healthy weight actually does make you small, if you consider "medium" to fit the average American. If the average American becomes plus-sized, I bet that it won't be called "plus" sized anymore.

Still, it does suck for tiny people. Personally, I am ecstatic that I can wear size 6 and small, even if it's vanity sizing (last time I checked I my measurements were something like 37/27/38). I have yet to find clothes that don't come small enough for me (unless I went shopping at Lane Bryant!).

Jessica, you're right. It's sad but I guess I'm not average, even though I really should be "average"!

You know, the only thing that might end the sizing insanity would be a noncompetitive sizing system. Where the different sizes couldn't be compared and rank ordered like they are now, with constant pressure to fit into smaller and smaller sizes -- or have small sizes get bigger and bigger to fit us! What if clothes were sized by color: red, blue, purple, green, pink etc? "Oh, I need a size brown in these jeans" -- no value attached and no stigma. Kind of like reading groups in school when you had the Blue Jays and Robins and Sparrows rather than slow readers and fast readers.

But ... I suppose people would figure out a color system and start making it a big competition all over again. Sigh. Maybe the only sensible thing to do is to size like men's clothes, in inches.

We really ought to size in inches! I don't know why we don't, it's really stupid. Then you could buy jeans sized by waist, hip, and inseam, and be guaranteed a fit.

I watched "The Devil Wears Prada" this weekend and honestly the talk about being thin made me sick. I know it was a comedy and they were making fun of the pressure to be thin, but seriously. It was disgusting.