I went shopping today because I had some coupons, and I was in the petites department some of the staffers kept giving me odd looks, since purely heightwise I'm not actually a petite and was towering over most of the other people there. However, if you look closely my legs are petite, meaning that I have to buy petite pants or the cuffs drag on the ground. One incidentally nice thing about petite pants is that you're more likely to find ones designed for someone with a curvier body like myself.
And what makes it more awkward is that I actually have a very long waist proportion-wise, to the point that I've occasionally sat next to friends who are in fact taller than me, but when we're sitting down it looks the other way around. So I have to shop in two different departments depending on which part of my body I'm shopping for. The short legs are from my dad's side of the family, where most of the women are fairly small, but my upper body seems to be from my mom's side, where they tend to be taller.
I have no idea how the genetics worked on that, but that's just how it turned out.