By Barbara Falconer Newhall

I discovered a forgotten pair of jeans at the back of my closet the other day. Nice jeans, I thought. I could throw them on for a quick trip to the drug store or the plant store. I tried them on. A perfect fit.

They were a size 10.

I did a double take. Wasn't I a size 10 in high school way back in the middle of the last century? But that was twenty pounds ago. (Okay, okay. Thirty pounds ago.) How could I still be a size 10? Was I remembering my high school self all wrong?

It was a digging-around-in-the-closet kind of day, so I kept on digging. There, in a garment bag at the farthest, dustiest, most forgotten reach of my closet was - my old plaid skirt from high school.

It was a Pendleton. Very high quality, my mother told me as she took out her credit card to pay. "You'll be wearing it when you're pushing a baby buggy around."

Except by the time my kids were born, baby buggies were passé and all the moms I knew were tossing tidy little collapsible umbrella strollers into the trunks of their cars.

Also - by the time my kids were born I was fortyish and definitely not 106 pounds any more. But still a size 10 or 12. Somehow.

Which brings me back to the question - was I or was I not a size 10 in high school?

I pulled the Pendleton from the garment bag to get a closer look. Sure enough. The label read size 10.

So, there you have it. I did indeed wear a size 10 in high school - all 106 pounds of me. And in college, a couple of pounds later, I was a perfectly svelte size 12. I have my old plaid kilt from my University of Michigan days to prove it. It's hanging right there in the closet next to the Pendleton. Size 12. Waist 24 inches.

It's called vanity sizing. Manufacturers have been cutting women's clothes larger and larger in recent years as the average American woman has grown plumper and plumper. The strategy lets women do that denial thing about their avoirdupois, so they can go on believing they are smaller than they really are. The trouble is, today's size 10 is too big for a lot of women, which is why we're seeing more and more clothes in size extra-small, extra-extra-small, size 0 and even size 00 on the ready-to-wear racks.

This is not a new trend. Way back in January, 1983, the US Department of Commerce dropped its universal sizing system for women's clothes because it no longer had any relationship to the size and shape of the average American woman.

But back in 1983 I was too busy pushing babies around in umbrella strollers to notice. As far as I knew, I was a perfect size 10 (or 12), and all was right with the world. As a matter of fact, all is still right with the world. As long as I can squeeze myself into those size 10 jeans.

© 2012 Text and photos Barbara Falconer Newhall