They stand at the racks all through lunch hour, flipping through long rows of jeans, not one pair of which has less than a 34-inch inseam.
They enter some of the finest clothing departments and suddenly become invisible, as sales clerks stare fixedly above their heads.
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They stand on the tailor`s box for a fitting and walk away in a garment splashed with chalk marks and pierced with more pins than a Saddam Hussein voodoo doll.
They return for the garment, try it on, and still look as if their trousers were fashioned from grocery bags, while the truncated jacket pockets will hold nothing longer than a pack of gum.
They tend to be regular guys in most respects, but their bodies swim in regular sizes. Belt and shirt pocket nearly meet at the bottom of the rib cage. Neckties overlap the fly. Socks bunch up in the toes of their shoes.
In most men`s stores, short people got no reason to shop.
A small but growing segment of the men`s clothing industry has begun to heed the problem, however, offering clothes expressly designed and
proportioned for the short-uh …
”We call them shorter men, not short,” said Cleveland clothier Bob Stern, the 5-foot-2-inch president of a thriving mail-order and retail business devoted to the stature-deprived. ”It`s a little softer way of saying it,” he explained. ”If you`re short, you`re short. If you`re shorter, it means you`re a little shorter than average. There are some sensitivities, you know.”
Stern certainly would know. He wears a size 38 extra-short.
At Wallaby Station, a Chicago menswear paradise for the shorter set, a diminutive concrete statue of a pint-sized marsupial guards the door at the convergence of Lincoln Avenue, Diversey Parkway and Racine Avenue. The wallaby, of course, is a small kangaroo.
Where the short man is king
Inside, customers are made to feel like big shots, surrounded as they are by oak paneling, polished brass, thick carpeting and a staff that looks them in the eye.
”The store is designed to make the shorter man feel comfortable,” said Wallaby Station general manager Dave Wittmer. ”We actually have chairs that are small. The entire wrap desk is at a slightly lower level. All the displays are a little lower than in a normal store-so are all the door knobs, light switches and fitting room ceilings. We have customers who are 5 feet tall. They don`t want to stand at a wrap desk that comes up to their chin.”
Wittmer, a slim 6-footer, confesses he feels a bit awkward as he roams around the selling floor. Fortunately for his shins and the customers` egos, he looms over Wallaby Station only on occasion. Most of the other personnel fall within the same size range as the store inventory-clothing and accessories for men 5 foot 8 and under.
Last spring, Wittmer, a veteran menswear marketer, supervised the remodeling and merchandise purchases for the new Wallaby Station on behalf of the owner, an investor who prefers to stay behind the scenes.
The store occupies part of an 1881 building in a space that once housed another shorter-men`s specialty shop called Marks Ltd. Now that the enterprise is well under way, Wittmer spends much of his time at the Glenview headquarters of the Short Men`s Apparel Association, where he serves as director of retail development.
”It`s a group of 30 stores for shorter men across the country,” Wittmer explained. ”We pool our volume and try to get the cuttings we need.”
Rebel with a cause
Bob Stern of Cleveland was a pioneer in badgering mass producers into thinking small. Before he started Short Sizes Inc. 18 years ago, he had his own suits made by a tailor, while he cajoled clothingmakers to sculpt outfits for the shorter male.
”There are certain manufacturers that just won`t touch an extra-short,” Stern said. ”They never have and they never will. Years ago, I would fly into New York just to meet with the Arrow shirt company. They were in the business of making short sizes for quite awhile, but they backed out of it about a year and a half ago. Consequently, we had to put our own private label program together.”
Stern issues two catalogs a year to 50,000 customers across the nation. The dapper, graying, short-clothing magnate even appears on a couple of pages in suits by John Weitz, Hart Schaffner & Marx and Tallia. Stern also compiles ”best-dressed” and ”worst-dressed” shorter-celebrity lists and claims a legion of followers.
It`s not a small world
Citing figures issued in 1980 by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Stern believes that about 18 percent of the adult male population could easily fit beneath the 5-foot-8-inch marker near the 7-Eleven store doorway. ”About 22 percent of the population is big and tall,” he noted.
”There`s no question it`s a bigger market, but it`s not that much different.”
Still, only some 30 stores in the U.S. specialize in shorter sizes, while big-and-tall establishments number in the hundreds. Stern has a ready explanation:
”While the need for a good fit is significant and important for the shorter guy, it`s not quite as compelling as it is for the big guy,” he said. ”If a piece of clothing isn`t large enough for the big guy to put on, he doesn`t wear it. But a shorter guy can always buy something too big and have it chopped off, or possibly try the boys` department.”
Those alternatives never did please the short-but-fastidious. ”Boys`
shops usually only go to a boy`s size 20, which is really like a size 38,”
Wittmer said. ”Plus, the quality is generally pretty junky.”
One man`s nightmare
Graphic designer Allen Porter, president of Porter/Matjasich and Associates, used to prowl the boys` departments, trying to unearth items proportionate to his 5-foot-2-inch stature and 39-inch chest.
”I would find things once in awhile,” Porter said, ”but then a lot of the stores stopped carrying a kids` line. I could buy a short size suit in the men`s department, but they were never quite right for men like me.”
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Shirts presented another problem. ”I take a 15 1/2-inch collar and a 30- inch sleeve, and that combination was just not available,” Porter said.
”I could get my neck size, but I couldn`t get a sleeve that wasn`t 2 inches too long. By the time I got it altered, there was hardly any split left in the sleeve above the cuff. There was nothing but a cuff and a solid sleeve. Ridiculous!”
With the Short Men`s Apparel Association and the high-volume Short Sizes Inc. casting their influence, manufacturers now churn out sizes they might have considered unthinkable a few years ago.
When Porter browses at Wallaby Station, he can feel just like the average guy-pulling shirts off the shelf, selecting ties, shrugging into sport coats and outerwear- knowing that the clothes will fit with only minor alterations. ”They`ve solved a lot of problems for me,” he said.
Getting the right fit
Wallaby Station and the Stern catalog offer solutions to problems even more dire than Porter`s. ”Most stores will carry short sizes from 38 to 44,” Wittmer noted. ”We carry shorts from 34 all the way to 52. In extra-short, we have 34 to 44. We also have short-portly from 40 all the way up to 54.
”The next size is close to impossible. It`s an extra-short portly.”
Wittmer motioned with his arms to describe a box. ”It`s this tall and this wide,” he marveled. ”I can`t say we have a tremendous selection in it, but that customer is not going to find it anywhere else.”
Shorter patrons come to appreciate the subtleties of tailoring meant just for them. The shirt pocket now rests directly on the left breast. Raincoat armholes caress the arms in just the right places. Coat pockets ride where hands can reach them.
Naturally, the lower extremities take on special significance for smaller men. Their legs may be long enough to touch the floor, but ill-formed trousers can make them look like the Michelin Man or Toulouse-Lautrec.
”The rise on the pants is probably the most common thing that goes wrong,” complained Dr. Jack Williams, a 5-foot-6-inch internist who abandoned his tailor after Marks Ltd. and then Wallaby Station opened.
According to current fashion magazine standards, slacks would drape gracefully down from a slim waist and cascade a bit over the shoe tops. Most men, however, aren`t models-short men least of all (with the possible exception of Bob Stern and his catalog cast).
”Generally, most short men have a short rise,” said Gordon Cohen, the vice president in charge of quality and design at Chicago`s Hart Schaffner & Marx. ”Say a man measures 30 inches from the crotch to the bottom of the inseam, and 40 inches from the top of the waistband to the bottom of the cuff. That difference is called the rise,” Cohen explained.
”In normal men, the rise tends to fall into a certain range of figures. In a short man, that distance must be shortened proportionately. You cannot take a regular trouser and just cut the leg off. That has to be in proportion to the rise. The knee has to be raised. Otherwise, they`re not going to fit him at the crotch, or the waist will be too high. They`re going to hang down with no shape.”
Cohen`s employer offers retail customers a wide range of short sizes, and he wants to retain the high-fashion looks or impeccable conservatism in the lower scale as well as at the Gentlemen`s Quarterly heights. Shortness, he found, does not add up to perfectly-scaled miniaturization in many cases.
”Short men have a slightly different physique,” Cohen said. ”They are usually more erect in their posture-to try to make themselves taller, I guess. So we have to cut the short-size jackets with a little higher shoulder.
”Longs tend to hold their heads forward, so the shoulders have more of a slope. For shorter men, you can`t just cut the jacket off at the bottom and shorten the sleeves. You must raise the waist in proportion, raise the buttons, raise the pockets, lower the back.”
With all that snipping and shaping now conducted on their behalf, the shorter Beau Brummels who take their business to the right places can hold their heads up high.
”I think it`s very appropriate that we talk about being short, make it a more open topic and not be so sensitive about it,” Stern said. ”In this age of openness, it`s appropriate that we not avoid it. And, eventually, shortness will not be an important issue.
A column that ran in our catalog said it best. It`s measuring up with an attitude, not an altitude.”
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To order a Short Size catalog, send $1 to 5385 Warrensville Center Rd., Cleveland, Ohio 475-2515.