So many, in fact, it's impossible to get to all of them for columns or stories. Sometimes it's because the research is so obscure it seems almost arcane, but most of the time it is just a matter of human resources and deadlines.
On Tuesday Brock University sent a release about some marketing research about fashion and models, which is not the kind of thing that would usually grab my attention. I normally rank fashion along side golf and televised poker as things I find so boring they could cast me into a deep coma.
But, (and please pay attention to this part public relations type people), its nearly clever headline was enough to keep me reading.
My first thought is "There is a size zero?"
How is zero, the total absence of anything, a flippin' size of clothing? Zero is nothing. That is why it is called zero.
Have we really reached a point of cultural disfunction where we are saying to women they need to fight into a size so small it could only exist in some sort of quantum reality?
How does a sales pitch for this madness work? "To fit into this size non-existent dress ladies, all the molecules in your body have to be compressed by the gravitational tidal waves of a supermassive blackhole. Unfortunately, this will make you very dead, but at least you don't have to wear a size up!"
But I digress.
The research done by Brock marketing professor Kai-Yu Wang did point to something interesting. Wang found that the women he studied, aged 18 to 25, preferred clothing models that were "average sized" - which is to say size six.
The super skinny-type model has become an issue of late. France is joining several European nations in banning the use of detrimentally thin models in advertising over concerns they have on body image, self-esteem and the connection that advertising has on the rates of anorexia and other eating disorders.
Wang wanted know if women actually preferred that skinny look in marketing aimed at them.
Turns out, they don't. The women preferred the "average" looking models.
Ultimately, Wang says marketers would be more successful if they used this "average sized" models rather than the super-skinny models, which are often the norm.
Wang sees this as perhaps a positive step forward when it comes to how we use the female body image to sell things.
Wang is probably right about that, but there is a lot more going on here.
Women's clothing sizes are numbers that have no bearing on reality. (Did I mention the size zero?) When I was a kid, the holy grail of fashion sizes for women was size 8. Which is now a 6 thanks to a marketing shell-game played by the fashion industry. Which is crazy.
So I am a little skeptical that a size-six fashion model is representative of the body of the average woman. It might be slightly more reality-like, but that might be about it.
Besides, the insane standards of beauty that advertising promotes has less to do with fictional sizes than the magic of computers.
How an "average" or so-called "plus size" model looks in advertising has been so digitally manipulated they aren't even semi-realistic representations of a human female. Lips of made thicker, skin tone is changed, legs and necks are lengthened, eyes are made larger and so on.
It is a cartoon reality, one that proposes an ideal of physical beauty that can't actually exist beyond pixels.
Certainly, the end of the ridiculously rail-thin models is a good thing. It's not healthy for anyone, and it is a good thing the women in Wang's study rejected that image as some kind of proxy of themselves.
But there is a long way to go, I would argue, before we reach a point where the situation has actually improved.
www.queenieaustralia.com/school-formal-dresses
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