Alright so my roommate’s girlfriend lost a pair of gloves at our apartment last winter. Thin, ribbed touchscreen ones, black. And I ended up wearing them for about three weeks before anyone said anything about it. Not because I thought they were mine. I knew they weren’t. I looked at them and was, like, “HELL YES I’m wearing Rachel’s gloves,” fully aware they were Rachel’s gloves the whole time.
But despite that, immediately getting hung up on the idea that those were women’s gloves and I was putting them on felt … exhausting. Weird.
Devin eventually noticed and roasted me for it, screenshotting the search result to our group chat with the caption “he’s been in Rachel’s gloves for A MONTH” and got reactions ranging from “who caresddduuuude” to another guy sending me the crying emoji four times in a row, which seemed dramatic for gloves specifically.
But aside from Devin costing me a couple hours of sleep that night it got me thinking, and I’ve been thinking about it ever since. Which, goddamnit, is way too much mental horsepower for a conversation about gloves. Why did that feel like such an event? They didn’t fail me. They bent to my will, kept my fingers and palms together and warm on a walk back from McDonald’s at one in the morning in January. Gloves do that. That’s what they exist to do. They did their job. nothing interesting happened, socially.
The sizing thing isn’t about biology, it’s about labeling
The thing I actually want to get mad about is how gendered sizing on gloves isn’t some foundational difference like: oh! ladies naturally have broader shoulders AND narrower hips that affect how their clothes should fit! it’s inherently different. No that’s not true. We’ll get to that. But for gloves specifically (and lots of other clothing items too) it’s literally just smaller numbers with a “women’s” sticker on them and larger numbers with a “men’s” sticker on them. That’s it. That’s the fucking lie they sell you. Most women’s medium gloves are the same glove as a men’s small, cut from the same pattern sewn by the same worker and placed on shelves in different sections of the store at different price points because WHY NOT?? That is infuriating enough, sure, but exactly the same rant I started earlier about marketing segments and jackets.
I actually went into a store and tested this out because I didn’t trust myself not to accidentally ruin my point by just saying it. Purchased online, obv, women’s large fleece lined gloves. From Costco. Inexpensive as shit gloves. Probably paid fourteen bucks. Standard-width fingers, saw if they’d fit. They fucking did. Not loosey goosey “honey these aren’t my gloves at all I got them confused.” Not tight, like “damn these are small”. Just fit. Like a men’s medium from that brand would’ve fit me, which they would’ve. Recorded me opening the package on my phone because I was making a youtube video about it. Deleted the video after editing because the thesis statement took all of eleven seconds to get across and I didn’t know how to fill the other fifty with content. “These are gloves. They fit me. Thank you.
” ←Not great editing.
Where it does become an issue, weirdly enough, is grip size and length of fingers when it comes to things like work gloves or ski gloves where women’s gloves actually sometimes run narrower on average around the palm, built around average dimensions of female hands which are, naturally, smaller than the average man’s hands. And skeletons. Women have smaller skeletons than men on average, which affects glove sizing when it gets more into tailored gloves. That’s science. What’s not scientific is assuming that average means everyone, and odds are against your hand, specifically your hand that is currently reading this on your specific gendered body, lining up perfectly with whatever the averages are that some marketer put on a label two years ago. Men have narrow hands. Some women have wider ones than those men. You shouldn’t care which row of gloves are labeled for you specifically. Labels aren’tDesigned to make sure your hands fit whatever size you theoretically should be, they’re there to get you SHOVING MORE MONEY AT THEIR BRAND.
I used to care about this too, but the only barrier here is your own brain
I want to preface this by saying that, again, the entire goddamn ethos of this site is me being willfully wrong about shit I didn’t know about at one point. I used to care about this. Maybe not gloves, but everything they represent. The sectioning of stores into dude stuff and lady stuff. Did these gloves exist on my spectrum of things I was allowed to put on my body? Sometimes I would pass stores and just be extra fucking self conscious about it because why not put a手 in the gloves when you’re selling gloves to people who don’t want to question their gender while they shop? Years ago but not that long ago I was maybe sixteen, maybe seventeen, needed a thin pair of gloves for something *gestures at life* and walked past the nicest gloves in that specific boxing because the cover had a woman’s hand on it. An actual photograph of a hand posed to model the glove on it. Like, the thumb and pointer finger aren’t EVEN MOVING the same way mine were when I tried them on.
Took the cheap gloves home. Thicker than I needed because again, wouldn’t wanna seem sketch buying ladies gloves. Waste of money. Why did I let a piece of cardboard decide what I was allowed to buy? Nobody cares. Like I said up top, actually. The cashier at whatever Bigtown Glove Emporium I robbed that day could not care less about your packaged goods. Someone screaming about you at their manager over gloves? Uneventful day for them.
That’s where the barrier is. Between you and what you think people are thinking about you. Devin sending me crying emojis wasn’t harassment, he was pointing out something silly so we could both laugh about it. And even if he hadn’t laughed, even if he had’ve made it a big shameful thing nothing would have come of it. You noticing something isn’t the problem, allowing that one moment to blossom into a Thing That Defines You is.
I didn’t do that. Months of wearing Rachel’s gloves, walked right up to her after the aforementioned freeze-thaw cycle we got and was like “sorry dude these were stretched out a bit” and handed them back. She wasn’t mad! Girlfriend had already replaced them by then.
So if you’re reading this on your phone right now standing somewhere between the manual and power glove racks deciding if men can wear women’s gloves *scops at you*, here’s what I would’ve told you if we were friends. Try them on. Disregard the stupid tag. Ignore the stupid selfie of some ladies hand they put on the front to market to womens. fit your fingers in the fingertips and see if your palm area has room to make a fist without it straining at the seems because that is the only test that matters, that is the only true test a pair of gloves has to pass. Let your hand be the judge of whether or not a glove is for you and not some label that’s been fucked up for decades.
Jamie is in his early twenties, lives in Manchester and makes menswear content for a living. He writes about whatever’s actually trending this week, fast and a bit chaotic, and he’ll happily tell you when he got it wrong.
