Old-Timey Clothing Ad For "Chubby" Kids
I saw this vintage ad here and was quite struck by it. The ad is from the 1970s, and the headline reads:
Tracy Harper may not care if fashionable chubby-sizes are hard to find, but her Mother does. And so does Sears.
This headline was the thing that really struck me about the ad initially. Why would a young girl not want cute clothes? I don’t even understand that from an advertising perspective. I guess the ad is targeted at mothers who want their children to look “fashionable,” regardless of how the kids feel about it. It just struck me as weird.
Moving on, here’s (most of) the body copy, which I have squinted at on your behalf:
Sears cares enough to make hard-to-fit young sizes easy to find. Flattering new looks designed for half-size figures. This perky party dress has a finely tucked bodice, low swinging pleats and a [something] of lace on its [something] collar and cuffs. Pink or blue in sizes 8 1/2 – 16 1/2.
The website that first posted the image is a sociology website, and some of the comments I also found interesting. One woman talks about her own experience with the history of the “chubby” sizes from Sears, and what they were called (when they existed, that is):
As children, my sister and I both wore those “chubby” sizes from Sears, which was the only retailer that had plus sizes for children in those days (early 1970s), as I recall. Their plus sizes for girls were called “chubby” and plus sizes for boys were called “husky”. When my sister’s step-daughters from her first marriage need plus-size clothes in the late 1980s, Sears children’s line for girls was called “Pretty Plus”. I don’t know what the boys line was called. By the mid- and late 1990s, when she had a daughter in her second marriage who needed plus size clothes, she had a hard time finding them. She just bought larger sizes and hemmed a lot.
The issue of the girl’s race is also brought up in that thread, and I thought these two comments were worth a read:
Note also that although the girl in the picture is black, her hair has been straightened (and cut in a style I at least associate with little white girls of the period, having been one and worn a similar hairstyle) and she’s wearing white leotards, and has been photographed against a light-coloured background, and in light-coloured clothing. Besides categorising her all those other ways, they’ve also done a really good job of “whitening” her as much as possible.
I would also point out that the name “Tracy Harper” strikes me as kind of a “white” name [or perhaps I should say a neutral name]. But I could be totally full of shit, and seventy-two Tracy Harpers of all sorts of ethnicities are about to post in the comments. Somebody call an ethnographer! (I have no idea if “ethnographer” is the right word, either.) Harper seems to be an Anglo-Saxon name, though, for what it’s worth. Anyway, more on race:
I’m curious about the publication, as advertisers rarely use a black person as the main character in ads meant to appeal to a white audience (unless it’s for one of the reasons explored in previous SI postings). Is this an ad from Ebony or the like? If it is indeed an ad from a ‘white-targeted’ publication, then there is an interesting argument to be made that the choice of a black child for a socially stigmatized product (clothes for fat kids) is intentional in other ways (perhaps to generate the recognition of the product’s availablity at Sears for potential white buyers while simultaneously not prompting an uncomfortable mental identification between the parents’ own kids and ‘fatties’ in need of ’special’ clothes). However, it’s also true that during this period, the crazy anti-fat hysteria of the present day was not as evident, and so the stigma was certainly not as acute.
And to wrap it up, one person’s childhood experience with plus-size clothing and her emotional response to the ad:
This post brought up a lot of upsetting memories. I wore “Pretty Plus” as a kid in the 70s and 80s, and shopping for them was always a horror show. The clothes weren’t as cute as for the smaller girls, and my mother was just mortified to have to be in that section.
Odd thing is – looking back on pictures of myself, I wasn’t fat! I was taller than pretty much all the kids, and just a bit bigger all around, but I was basically concave. So looking at this pic of a girl who really does not look the least bit chubby makes me feel angry on her behalf…and on my own behalf, as a kid who had the temerity to be bigger than the others.
I wish that clothes could just be made in a wide range of sizes naturally, and not be stigmatized into the “pretty plus” or “women’s” or “chubby” or “husky” categories. Especially not for kids, who can’t get the same clothes as their thinner friends, and who are most likely to take these labels to heart. What do you think?
Posted by mo pie
Filed under: Advertising, Fashion, Kids, Magazines, Old Timey, Race & Ethnicity
It was always tough to have to wear those sizes when I was little (ha! little…). I remember sometimes having to order from the Sears catalog because they didn’t have 16 1/2 or 18 1/2 or whatever the hell it was in stores. I think after some time my mom or I got sick of it and I started buying misses’ stuff.
I should add that being called fat by my evil peers was bad enough on its own, having to show up to school in old lady leggings and big t-shirts (thank you, early 90s fashion) didn’t help.
That would be “a froth of lace on its stand-up collar and cuffs.” I am a master squinter.
I have a faint memory of seeing a clothing rack with a “chubbies” sign at JCPenney or someplace, and I was too young to really get what it meant.
What happened to the “chubby” size designation anyway–did retailers just expand the range of destigmatized sizes?
Tracey Harper doesn’t sound like a black name??? (which is what you are implying by saying it sounds like a “white name”)
You have to be kidding me.
Does Jennifer Hudson sound like a black name?
Or Will Smith?
Or do all POC have to have names like Lakeisha and Tyrone, Barack and Beyonce?
Puhleeze…
I think it’s tricky whenever an advertiser has to assign a fake name to a person of color–because you’re right, do you give them a more neutral name (which I would argue “Tracy Harper” is) or do you try to give them an “ethnic” name and risk seeming condescending?
I was just interested in the point the commenter was making, that they were attempting to “whiten” the girl in the ad in vairous ways. I’m not sure if her name qualifies as an attempt at “whitening” or not, or if that was the advertiser’s intent in the first place.
I was one of those “Pretty Plus” gals, but as I got older, I just started wearing misses’ sizes. But this was in the 80s, when it seemed weight didn’t matter as much when it came to fashion. Women of all shapes and sizes were rocking the leggings, oversized T-shirts, big-ass belts, and dayglo colors.
Tracy Harper may not care if fashionable chubby-sizes are hard to find, but her Mother does
I think the copy on this is just badly written. I didn’t actually read it to mean that Tracy didn’t care about being fashionable (which seems to be the general consensus); I read it to mean that Tracy wanted to be fashionable and didn’t care how hard it was for her mom to find fashionable “chubby-sizes.”
I can’t imagine that the advertising agency would have considered the former interpretation a selling point, and given that they’re pitching that (hideous) dress as fashionable, it wouldn’t make sense that she’d be wearing it if she didn’t care about fashion. Does that make sense? I think it’s just really badly worded.
As to the race, I will confess my relative ignorance and just say that the observations in the post and comments are FASCINATING.
Um. That last part should have been “race ISSUES.” I’m a little tired today. :P
From as early as I can remember shopping for clothes with my mother was always painful and shame based. I was not the “perfect” daughter that she had imagined after having three older brothers. During the 60s and 70s when thin, “Twiggy” was in, hot pants etc… it was difficult shopping for cute clothes let alone in my size without it being a traumatic experience for me. You never forget!
Ha! Oh my god, Marste, you’re so right. I completely misread that headline.
Actually, what I find really freaky about that photo is that the little girl’s face looks simultaneously drugged and uncomfortable. Like a Stepford refugee. *shudder* It makes me wonder if she was one of those kids with a stage mom who made her do the catalog stuff when the kid would rather have been outside playing. (Not that I ever witnessed that when I was dancing . . . :P)
Wendy asked:
“What happened to the “chubby” size designation anyway–did retailers just expand the range of destigmatized sizes?”
No, they didn’t. At least the retailers in Canada haven’t – stores like the Gap and Old Navy carry jeans in ‘Plus’ sizes for kids. They’re the same styles as their ‘normal’ sized jeans, so there’s not the same freak-colour (clothing colour, not kid colour!) stigmatization that was often found in the ‘chubby’ sizes of yore. Most places that sell kid-wear sell a lot of stretchy yoga and sport-type pants that accommodate a large range of body types, so that makes things easier.
I can totally identify with ‘Tracy Harper’s’ mom – my girls just want to dress like their friends, and it IS harder, sometimes, to find the cute clothes in larger sizes. Sometimes deconstruction is not our friend, so much – I see that ad and don’t break it down into social stereotypes or corporate patronization – I see that ad and think, “Yeah, Tracy Harper’s mom- it IS hard to find cute clothes for girls who don’t fit into the regular sizes for their age!”
All I can say is thank goodness that Sears (and their sister Kmart) has gotten much better about being *discreet* re: girl’s plus!! FTMP they now have the pluses mixed with the regular sizes with nothing more than a little pink tag reading “girl’s plus” attached alongside the price tag (and of course the half sizing instead of whole).
The Sears near us even has Hannah Montana, Cheetah Girls, etc etc in the girl’s plus in the same styles as the regular (no comment about the appropriateness of those shows for girls who are in the kid’s department, my daughters don’t watch them, but at least their friends of *all* sizes have the same options!)
My daughter is a truly chubby girl (unlike dear Tracy in the ad, there is no question that her proportions are much different than most children’s) and she has a ridiculously huge wardrobe of cute Girl’s Plus stuff from Kmart and Sears. Now if only it was as easy to find things for the 13yo……at 5’8″ she’s irreversibly in adult sizes, and it’s HARD to find cute, not revealing but still youthful clothes in a juniors 15-17!!!!!
See, I read that “Tracy may not want fashion, but her mom does!” and interpreted it as “Sears sells clothes that YOU as a mother think are appropriate for your child and remind you of the fashions of your youth, but your kids will hate them!”
… Or maybe I’m just looking at that pink dress and remembering some mind-boggling things my mom tried to dress me in.
Boy am I lucky…if my mom saw that dress she’d puke. I was never allowed to wear anything pink and frilly. Think how that dress would look on a kid that was chubby.
Maybe the weird disconnect the ad implies between what the daughter and the mother want has to do with the contemporary perception of Sears as a less desirable retailer (at least during the ’80s)? I remember not just getting teased for my weight and for what my clothes looked like, but because of where the other kids thought my clothes came from (K-mart was considered the lowest origin, Sears not much higher). Maybe, “your daughter may not want to shop here, but you (Mom) know this is the only place you’ll be able to find passable clothes that fit her?” Maybe that’s the subtext?
Weird, no matter how you look at it.
Emmy, I think I’m with you – though, Marste, you have an interesting take!
When I was a kid, I wanted to wear the things I thought were comfortable, or had characters I liked on them. My mom wanted me to be fashionable. We used to have big fights over this – the biggest of which was when she insisted I wear a blazer to my 8th grade graduation and I stormed out of the house and walked for half an hour around the block because I was so mad! (Now, I wear jackets a lot – I can never find ones that really fit, but I welcome the extra warmth.) I guess some kids – and maybe more these days? – do care about being fashionable, but I also know others just roll their eyes at the whole business.
Like Dar Williams says, in the voice of a young woman/little girl looking at the mall: “and the sign says ‘less is more’/more that’s tight means more to see/ – more for them not more for me/ that could help me climb a tree in ten seconds flat.”
Is that little girl in the ad supposed to be “chubby”? She looks pretty thin to me!
I may be alone in this, but I read this ad as kind of fat-pos, to be honest.
Here’s Sears marketing *fashionable* plus-sized clothes for kids! It acknowledges that fat kids care about looking good (as do their parents) and being fashionable. It offers a product that in the 70s was pretty unique (taking the needs of bigger kids into consideration), and I like “chubby” a lot better than “pretty plus.” It’s honest, and I think “chubby” for little kids even today (but certainly then) was considered a positive thing. A chubby baby, or kids with “baby fat” were considered perfectly normal.
And I think it’s great that they used a black girl with dark skin for the ad. The fact that they whitened up the clothes and background just emphasizes her dark skin. A pretty little chubby girl wearing fashionable clothes that were made to fit her, looking adorable. All in all, I think it’s fantastic, especially for the 70s.
My only qualms are with the straightened hair and relative slimness of the girl, but I think that’s what passed for chubby in the 70s.
Certainly, stores should just carry larger sizes without stigmatizing them with a special “chubby” category, but as far as this kind of thing goes, I think it’s great.
Who are the people who decide what childrens’ (or ADULTS’) clothing sizes are, anyway? It’s pretty random. Kids grow at different rates. By the time I was in 5th grade I was 5’7″. I thought I was fat, but I wasn’t.
When my son was a baby, he was considered small. But we STILL had to buy clothes in a larger size! (Ex., the “6 Mo.” size was WAY too small for him when he was 6 months old.)
My daughter was a very chubby baby (it was hard not to squish her cute little legs all the time), and then, as a toddler, had a growth spurt and the chub spread out over her now long legs. So, at the ripe old age of 5, she’s all muscle. (Oh how I miss those chubby thighs!!!!)
I thought the “doesn’t care” meant she doesn’t care how hard it is for her mom to find them, not that she doesn’t care about pretty clothes.
I find it amusing, though, that by modern standards Tracy doesn’t look so chubby. I would have killed to have been that svelte in third grade.
I wore my share of freak-show polyester “chubby” clothes in the 70’s. I think my mom gave up and just sewed a lot of my stuff until I was 10 or so, and by then I was tall and fat enough to move on to the grownup section. I do remember wanting to be like my friends, and it just wasn’t possible.
My children are tall and sturdy, but not really overweight. It is already hard to explain to my daughter that we can’t find in size 8 or 9 what her classmate is wearing so daintily in size 5 or 6. I am grateful that it’s getting easier to find children’s “plus” sizes and that stretch fabrics are more common.
Never saw a Sears ad with a black child model, but suspect it may have been aimed at a regional audience.
As to the name: has anyone forgotten that enslaved blacks, once freed from their masters, often took their former owners’ surnames? All those WASPy Southerners have descendants running the gamut of color, and all bearing those same Anglo-Saxon names. Since many slaves became Christians, it’s no surprise that successive generations have persisted in choosing similarly “white” sounding first names, as well as innumerable Christian names from the Bible.
Ah – a little history can be SUCH a positive thing!
Interesting. Then it is badly written, because I read it the complete opposite way — that Tracy didn’t care at all.
You know what else I think? I saw this for the first time last week. I think I’m tired of talking about it because it amalgamates so many distressing issues.
Or maybe I’m just having that sort of day. I’m due. It’s been awhile.
I think the extent to which children are expected to care about and pick their own clothes has changed a lot in the last 30 years (like, my lifetime). When I was the same age as “Tracy”, in the mid-80s, my mother was definitely the one who picked out my clothes – I had a say, but no real freedom until I got a clothing allowance, aged 12. I’m not sure now whether I think that’s late or early to be allowed to select all your own clothes – maybe it depends on the child!
Back then, children’s clothing in Britain was sized by age (to a great extent it still is), and I was always in a size a few years “above” my real age because I was tall, though not overweight. I have no idea how larger kids (and their parents) coped with this system.
I was also an early developer, and around age 11 was in women’s sizes – hard to find in age-appropriate styles. I remember an expensive but horrible grey party dress which was the only child-styled outfit my mother could find for me to wear to a wedding (she didn’t let me have the one with the ra-ra skirt and off-the-shoulder bodice. She was probably right. I still think I would have rocked it).
It wasn’t until age 13 or so that the focus on having what everyone else had really started. I remember an intense scrutiny of each others’ clothes size; I was a 14 (US10) and it seemed everyone else in the world was a 10 or maybe a 12. Now, you can definitely get everything in a 14; then it was less certain, but the stigma was in wearing a 14 as much as in wearing the “wrong” clothes.
(I wouldn’t be 13 again for a million pounds.)
(I have known four Trac(e)ys. One is black, two are white, and one is Hong Kong Chinese.)
In the 70s, I was ashamed to be shopping with my mom in the “Chubby Bee” section of Sears. The picture of the large fat bee on the wall horrified me and I wanted to get out of there before anybody I knew could see me.
The thing that bothers me most about this ad is that “Tracy” isn’t even remotely “chubby”! She looks like an average girl to me. She is probably around the size that a lot of us were when we began hearing that we were fat. Now we look at those photos and think to ourselves, why the hell was everyone telling me I was fat? They should have left me alone and I probably would have been fine.
I do remember the “Husky” and “Pretty Plus” sections at Sears. And when my mom took me there to find clothes it was always a disaster. Me hating my body because it didn’t even fit into these “fat” sizes.
But the real problem started when I grew out of the children’s department and had to find clothing as a teen. But then, a miracle happened. Culture Club released a music video where Boy George was wearing stretchy pants and an oversized shirt! Withing days (it seemed) there were huge shirts, leggings, and genie pants (anyone remember those) everywhere and things got easy for a while.
Then I started the diet cycle of destruction and ended up far more fat than I ever thought I would be.
I think the color sceme of the clothes/background in the ad, plays up the fact that Tracy is black, there’s a lot of contrast to her skin, making it seem like more of a focus, if she was white she’d get lost in the picture. Tracy was a pretty popular name (24th most common in the 70’s) and popular names usually end up being pretty race nueteral, it’s just a generic name for the time, probably why it was picked.
That said, clothes shopping as a kid sucked, my mom did let me pick out my own clothes very young, and it was infuriating. By the time I was in junior high, I was relegated to elastic waisted jeans, and granny clothes…it was abysmal. Luckily high school brought with it Torrid, which was the godsend of fat girl clothing, and plus sizes, changed a lot.
I’ve tried to block out the memory of shopping with my mother for clothing as a “chubby” child, but reading the ad and blog post took me down a memory lane trip (a shitty one, for that matter) for a moment.
In the late 80s, early 90s I remember shopping at JCPenney for MOST of my school clothing. I was comparable to the girl on the ad – seemingly normal but with somewhat chunky legs and a bit of a belly. I remember JCP published a special catalog insert for Girl’s plus (extended girls sizing) and another for Boy’s “husky” attire. I was a short kid and had an AWFUL time finding appropriate-length pants in the girl’s plus section. They were always made for taller girls. I hated the cuts of the waists (typically high up and cinching) and despised the jeans with the stupid elastic waists on the back, which seemed to be the norm for the chubby girls.
Luckily, like another poster said – leggings and tshirts were in style at the time. I loved those. Leggings, big tshirts with boy bands (NKOTB, anyone?), and puffy hair was a typical look. I also rocked the DJ from Full house long sweater skirt + leggings look from time to time. These were outfits that my mom and I actually didn’t fight about in the dressing room.
THEN…that went out of style and I became more of a tomboy. I typically wore boy’s jeans and sweatshirts or t-shirts everyday. This was probably at the height of the Grunge movement. Hoodies, band/slogan tshirts, and Starter apparel became more common and I enjoyed wearing them, despite how frumpy I appeared. Maybe this was the point of the ad…I know I enjoyed being comfy and abhorred dress clothing at the time, despite pushes from my mother to dress more feminine.
Who knows. Bit of a creepy ad, anyway.
I’ll tell you what–I’d sure rather be called “chubby” than “curvy”. Call ’em like you see ’em, boys.
And in case anyone else hasn’t mentioned it in the comments, I think the idea of the first line of the ad is not that Tracy doesn’t care if she’s unfashionable but that Tracy doesn’t care if Mom has to go from store to store to find clothes for Tracy; she just gets to wear whatever Mom brings home.
The kid in that pic doesn’t look chubby at all. :P Nice article!
Good blogpost, thanks a lot!
I too was subject to humiliation by a parent who insisted I buy my childhood clothing in Sears’ “Chubby Department”. I remember how embarassed I was and realized I could have just bought a larger size in the regular children’s department. I was maybe 10 – 20 lbs overweight at the time and to this date, at 50 years old, am still upset about being forced to shop in that deparment.