The word downsizing, both an excuse and not a very happy euphemism for firing people, needs, I have decided, a mate: upsizing. The country seems to be in a serious upsizing phase. When and where and how it began, I don’t pretend to know, but I have a lurking — as opposed to a somersaulting — suspicion that it may have begun with the naming of the size of cups at Starbucks.
A Dunkin’ Donuts man, I don’t often go into Starbucks. But when I used to frequent the joint I found myself charmed by the comedy of the language of ordering, all that decaf, double espresso, steamed, skimmed, mocha, capu-frappo-Americano, and the rest of it. But what I couldn’t get my (admittedly) literal mind around was the naming of the sizes of Starbucks cups. A small cup there is known as a tall, a middle-size cup is a grande, and a large cup is a venti, the Italian word for twenty, which must stand for twenty ounces. Let’s go through this again: A small is a tall, a medium is a grande, a large is a venti. Got it? If so, perhaps someday you will explain it to me.
America now being the world’s lone superpower, perhaps the word small is no longer permitted to us. At 5’7″ — if I stand up straight — and 135 pounds, I have a personal stake in this matter of the disappearance of the word small. I’m not sure which gets lost first, the word or the thing it describes, but I do know once a word is lost soon the thing itself departs. Now that the word disinterested is gone, for example, so are the men and women who once possessed the fine impartiality the word connoted.
In the upsizing revolution, even I rarely any longer wear size small, but have been promoted to a medium in polo shirts and a large in T-shirts and sweat shirts. It is mildly amusing, if too late to be confidence-building, to think of myself as a large. Lots of casual clothes are now unisex, so sizes have everywhere jumped up, and the fact that much fashion calls for a baggy fit increases this propensity. Clothing catalogues often mention that an item is “oversized.” So an average-size man often wears not merely large but extra large, while a large man can wear clothes with as many as three Xs before the large.
I was sitting at a baseball game in Wrigley Field in Chicago this summer with a friend from Los Angeles. Two rows in front of us sat two beefy guys, pure Chicago characters, each of them well over 250. Such bodies, I said to my friend, were likely to be deported from California, where everyone, I assumed, worked very hard to stay in starved-to-perfection shape. Not so, he replied. A new physical type was in the land, large, wide, slightly menacing, the human equivalent of the Sports Utility Vehicle.
In football, the 300-plus-pound lineman is commonplace, the 250-pound running back not much less so. Lots of high-school basketball players are showing up at 6’8″. What is discouraging to a small fellow is that these huge guys, in football and in basketball, can be whippet quick and nearly Astaire-ish in their coordination. When I was a boy athlete, really large players had the common decency to be ill-coordinated and generally hopeless. That this is no longer so is hell on the sports fantasies of a man like me — slender but slow, small but without any notable moves.
The national average height of Americans is increasing along with the national figures for longevity. So many tall men nowadays walk the streets that the term “six-footer” seems to have gone the way of the word “millionaire” — neither, that is, is a term that any longer commands interest. Lots of taller women about, too. In tennis, two of the great pros, Venus Williams and Lindsay Davenport, are, respectively, 6’1″ and 6’2″.
The old ideal in feminine beauty was the shortish — 5’1″ to 5’4″ — bosomy woman, on the model of the young Elizabeth Taylor or Julie London. Gone without the wind. Woman-watching in airports I note many more women pass by whom I’d describe as tallish than shortish, lots of them wearing platform shoes that, putting them on their own pedestals, raise them even higher. Tallish, even quite tallish, no longer seems odd but has come to seem attractive. In the recent Olympics, players on the women’s volleyball teams appeared rather elegant, most of the chunky little women gymnasts a bit grotesque.
A clothing store designed for small men, the reverse of the Big and Tall men’s shops, has begun to advertise on the classical music station I listen to in Chicago. It calls itself Napoleon’s Tailor. I may one day drop in to check out the threads. I assume that it, too, has oversized clothes for the smaller man. The next time you see me I could be wearing a new suit from Napoleon’s Tailor, a size 54 small, relaxed fit. Stop me, please, if I suggest we march on Moscow.
JOSEPH EPSTEIN
