Unhappy Returns

What really happens to all the pants that don’t fit

- By Amanda Mull. Photograph by Jason Fulford and Tamara Shopsin

Consider the dressing room. The concept began its mass-market life as an amenity in Gilded Age department stores, a commercial sanctuary of pedestals and upholstered furniture on which to swoon over the splendid future of your wardrobe. Now, unless you’re rich enough to sip gratis champagne in the apartment-size private shopping suites of European luxury brands, the dressing room you know bears little resemblance to its luxe progenitors.

Over the course of several decades and just as many rounds of corporate budget cuts, dressing rooms have filled with wonky mirrors and fluorescent lights and piles of discarded clothes. At one point in your life or another, as you wriggled your clammy body into a new bathing suit—underpants still on, for sanitary purposes—you have probably experienced the split-second terror of some space cadet trying to yank the door open (if you’re lucky enough to have a door). Maybe you have heard your own panicked voice croak, “Someone’s in here!”

Through the 1990s and into the 2000s, even as stores became dingy and understaffed, the dressing room try on remained a crucial step in the act of clothing yourself. But as online shopping became ever more frictionless— and the conditions in the fitting room ever less desirable— Americans realized that it might just be better to order a few sizes on a retailer’s website and sort it out at home. Estimates vary, but in the past year, one-third to one-half of all clothing bought in the United States came from the internet. More shopping of almost every type shifts online each year, a trend only accelerated by months of pandemic restrictions and shortages.