In June 1945, Norma made her first appearance, at an exhibition hall at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. Everything about her, at least according to the people who designed her, is “just right.” Norma has the Goldilocks butt, the Goldilocks body. If it were made of flesh, it would fill out a swimsuit nicely, but I doubt it would elicit a long second look. It is substantial, a handful, but no one would call it big. It’s round and pert and, because it’s made of stone, alarmingly smooth. Norma’s butt is 29 inches across, from hip bone to hip bone. But the fashion industry isn’t the only entity that has invested in the damaging idea of “normal”-it has long been used by society at large to other and exclude. Bodies are bespoke, yet most clothes made since the 1920s are mass-produced industrial products: when the pants don’t fit, it’s because the proportions of a body don’t match up to the proportions that the clothing companies imagined for it. “Normal” is an insidious concept-and one that the fashion industry has long tried to define.

But what is this middle thing, this normal thing? My mother always said her butt was too big. This middle thing is somehow both an ideal and an average, made perfect by not being too much of anything.

For everything that reveals itself to be too big, or too small, there is the clear indication that somewhere there is a thing that is just right, a body that is in the middle, a body that is correct. Pants are a physical object you can hold in your hands, reminding you that there are parts of your body that literally do not fit. In addition to all the other tacit work the fashion industry does to define what different body types mean, clothing offers a frank materialization of rightness.

Heather radke butts