The Widening Of America

All over America, the buzzword is big: big houses, big malls, big cars, and big Americans inside them.

And, reports Correspondent Mika Brzezinski on CBS News Sunday Morning, that doesn't appear to be an accident.

"Sixty-five percent of Americans are overweight or obese. Overweight is the new average," observes David Sokol, managing editor of International Design magazine, or I.D. magazine for short. He says designers and urban planners are creating an America that accommodates its increasingly overweight population, but you'd never know it."

"There is tremendous profit potential out there for companies and designers who cater their products to obese people," Sokol points out. "The challenge, though, is to give them that product that allows them to function in everyday life more easily and more comfortably without making them feel disabled, without calling attention to themselves. …Fat is a four-letter word."

One of the most common ways of making overweight people feel smaller, Brzezinski explains, is by expanding the world around them. It's what architectural designers call "framing".

"A person who is big does not want to look big," Sokol remarks. "So if their house is bigger, they'll look of more average proportion."

Big homes, bathrooms, beds and cars can provide a large frame for people in private, Brzezinski notes, and now, when they go out to public spaces, architectural regulations make it so everyone fits most anywhere, anywhere, that is, that was designed recently.

"A stadium seat from 100 years ago, you know, Soldier's Field in Chicago, might have been, I think, 16 or 17 inches, max," Sokol says. "When they designed the new Soldier's Field … the expectation for new seats was many inches more than that."

The same applies to public transportation around the country. It's become roomier.

For instance, the 72nd Street subway station in New York City was built back in 1904. "If you measure the seating (on the platform)," Sokol says, "you'll see that it is 17 inches wide, which would be inconceivable in modern-day seating. (Today), it would probably be anywhere between 19 and 24 inches."
Old-fashioned subway cars are unwelcoming to larger bodies, Brzezinski says. There are poles in between the seats. And the color-coded bucket seats were designed for people some 20 years ago, who on average had smaller "assets."

"If you are bigger than average, (bigger) than (an old subway) car's designer had calculated, you're going to get in the way of your neighbor," Sokol observes. Obese people can spill over into the seats next to them.

After years of such personal-space intrusions, newer subway cars have been adapted.

On one such car, Sokol tells Brzezinski, "Some of the things we're going to find are obesity-friendly, starting with the doors. The doors are wider than the older cars."

Inside, the car is more spacious. There are fewer poles. But the biggest difference is the bench seating where, Sokol notes, "There's no expectation that a person's of average size."

What is average size? Not even your tailor knows for sure, Brzezinski remarks. "Over the past 20 years, the American fashion industry has manipulated clothing sizes to accommodate its widening public, especially women.

"The size of the American woman is a hugely intense and much talked about topic these days," says Timothy Gunn, who chairs the Department of Fashion Design at the Parsons School of Design in New York City. He says, while the numerical size of a woman's garment has decreased, its physical size has increased.

Brzezinski asked Gunn about something she's noticed over the years: "As I grow, I've … actually become sizes I always wanted to be. How did that happen?"

"The American fashion industry," Gunn responded, "wants the consumer to believe that, in fact, they are something they are not. It's a very clear case of commerce deceiving the public. …'The sizing scheme,' I think we could call it, by seducing the plus-sized woman into the store and saying, 'Feel good about yourself because, in fact, you're only a (size) 12. You may think you're more than that, but in our establishment, you are a 12.' And you can say that with impunity."

To show how sizing has changed over time, Gunn showed Brzezinski size eight dresses from the 1980s, '90s, and today. The waist circumference on a 1984 dress was 25-1/2 inches. On the 1995 dress, it was 26 inches. And on a 2004 dress, it was 27-1/2, a two-and-a-half inch difference from 1984 to 2004.

Gunn says the deception is intentional, "because the woman has gotten bigger, yet her size gets smaller."

The sizing deception, Brzezinski points out, is a product of American ingenuity. Sizing standards in other parts of the world have remained constant.

"The Europeans have an entirely different view of fashion," Gunn says, "and their sizing hasn't changed."

In America, however, not only is a size eight different from designer to designer, it's different from item to item by the same designer, as Gunn demonstrated with two dresses made by Donna Karan.

First up, a dress from a high-priced line, the Donna Karan collection. "I think," Gunn says, "we have a real size eight dress in this Donna Karan. It's collection. It's the highest end. It's the brand that goes all over the world, and I think they are sizing responsibly, the way Europeans do."

Not so with DKNY, Donna Karan's less expensive line of clothing. "It's not fitted in the same way (the more expensive dress) is, on purpose, Gunn explains. "Because there's more that the designer wants to hide in this case."

And, Brzezinski adds, it's a mass-market dress meant to appeal to more women and more women are going to (have bigger waists).

Gunn says, as long as designers make it so women continue to fit into what they think of as their "normal" size, they have little incentive to watch their weight.

Sokol agrees. He says, in the case of building and product design, the problem is like the one about the chicken and the egg: Who came first, the design engineer or the overweight and obese?

"Designers are complicit in this," Sokol asserts. "Even though they may have a client who says. "I need you to design a cup that holds 48, 64 ounces, as opposed to our old fashioned eight ounce soda can,' they're not simply creating the cup. They're … making it more ergonomically correct, to make that huge cup that doesn't seem possible to lift, easier to hold."

A case, he says, or designers as enablers.

And when it comes to enabling, it's not just size that matters.

Looking at huge cup with a narrow bottom for cup holders, Sokol says, "This thing is perfectly designed for the car. It fits into a standard-sized cup holder. You can get fat whenever and wherever you want."

It's all those conveniences of the good-life, Sokol says, that are the key to obesity in America: "Malls throughout the land are a symptom of something that's wrong here. And that is the way developers and architects and urban planners carved up land to make suburbs, subdivisions, whatever, and are feeding the car culture. And the more we need to drive … the more sedentary we're going to be, and the fatter we're going to get. …This is, all puns intended, a huge problem."