Sizing chaos
pudding.cool669 points by zdw 16 hours ago
669 points by zdw 16 hours ago
For everyone struggling with clothes sizing and having a hacker mindset, I can't recommend enough buying a sewing machine (~100EUR on a used market, ~150 new gets you a reasonable starter one you won't outgrow any time soon) and giving clothes alterations a try.
Finding a tailor that understands you / you agree with is an option too, if time is a hard limit (though I'm not sure it's altogrther that much quicker).
In my case, I started with tailors, but kept running into small misunderstandings. Also, my taste keeps evolving.
Start small with simple stuff, ideally old / second hand cheap clothes. Shirts, T-Shirts and bodice waistlines / "darts" are almost trivial once you can follow a straight line. First one will take a while, second will be much quicker, by third / fourth it's almost a routine and you can start iterating on your own preferences. They likely "will" evolve as you keep wearing the altered clothes.
Depending on how much help you can get in the beginning, with maybe a 2-3h intro on how to use a sewing machine done by a friend who has sewing as a hobby, I'm pretty sure most people should be able to get their first alterations done within 4-5h. By second or third attempt, this time should be down to around 1h per item, including some setup (pinning - trying - ironing). At that point the DIY option is probably quicker than going to a tailor.
I also fixed clothing sizes for my family using a hacker mindset, but in a different way:
Did you know that most professional sewing charts are just DXF files?
And did you know that DXF is the most common file format for laser cutters?
;)
=> just let the machine cut out precisely the clothing shapes that you need
After a few tries, I also started to add small sideways cuts to the outlines as alignment markers. And then you just need to connect the pieces where you marked them while always leaving roughly 0.5 cm of gap to the laser cut line. I went with 0.5 because my sewing machine has a hardware alignment guide with that offset. And at that point, it takes a skilled tailor only mere minutes to finish a shirt, which means in exchange for their 1x hourly rate they will be willing to finish off 5x proto t-shirts for you.
Oh, I'm not claiming sewing machine is the "only" option :-)
There's plenty of hacking that can be done on the subject of sewing and I admit that laser cutter is a cool one.
I'm still pretty partial to that sewing machine route (or needle and thread, if handiwork is prefferable). Simply because it lets you quickly iterate and build the taste, preferences and heuristic of how to get there. Personally, I still can't read a pattern propetly. But I'm more than happy to put a few pins into a shirt and prototype in front of a mirror.
Also, it gives me a good estimate of what I'm OK doing myself and what I will outsource to an actual tailor because it's either beyond my level, or I simply don't have time to do it.
I wonder how many layers of fabric a cutter could get through in one pass (without setting it on fire).
Is overlock a necessity?
TLDR : "nice to have, but not a necessity"
For some basic jerseys (think T-shirts) a basic zigzag is fine to begin with. That 100EUR sewing machine will have some fancier stretch stitch options that are slow, but "good enough" to look like an overlock (but can't do the cut of course).
If you have the space / money, overlock is definitely what I'd get as a second / third machine. It's much quicker / cleaner if you're working on jerseys or shirts.
But I still keep wearing the T-shirts I did when I was starting. On my list the first thing to do is to understand how to alter something to fit you. It can be done by hand (needle and thread), but to be reasonably efficient, the BOM would be "sewing machine, box of pins, scissors, piece of chalk / ruler and something to press / iron".
This is a great use of data to make a compelling case that sizing sucks for women's clothing!
I do wish it attempted to answer the question at the end, though: "Sizes are all made up anyway — why can’t we make them better?"
Like, why doesn't the market solve for this? If the median woman can't buy clothing that fits in many brands, surely that's a huge marketing opportunity for any of the thousands of other clothing brands?
This is, to be clear, a sincere question - not a veiled argument against OP or anything! It seems like there are probably some structural or psychological or market forces stopping that from happening and I'd love to understand them. Same with the "womens clothes have no pockets" thing!
>Like, why doesn't the market solve for this? If the median woman can't buy clothing that fits in many brands, surely that's a huge marketing opportunity for any of the thousands of other clothing brands?
Because
- in reality it's not much of a problem. Billions of women manage to buy and wear clothes just fine. Some might fit slightly better or worse, but unless you have very special body shape (and even extreme thick/overweight/tall/short are covered by niche brands) you can get in any clothes store and get plenty of clothes to wear
- some random brand making something that fits better doesn't mean any sizeable consumer percentage is going to buy it. First because see above, and also because a lot of clothes purchases are about brand and fashion and status signalling, not mere fit.
- if some women absolutely can't find something in their size from a specific brand, that makes the brand even more exclusive, like it being "for fit people only". Obviously brands for thicker and even obese people also exist, but they're seen as a brand of need, not a brand you'd be proud having to wear
> if some women absolutely can't find something in their size from a specific brand, that makes the brand even more exclusive, like it being "for fit people only"
The elephants in the room from the raw data is it is very clear some brands do not want average middle aged women wearing their products. Anthropology seems to be the most clear about this in that they have a literal gap between their standard and plus-sized ranges that excludes the adult median woman.
Now some brands might do that out of snobishness, but I expect there is a feedback loop here:
1) Young, attractive women want to make fashion choices that signal they are young, attractive women.
2) They buy from fashion lines that don't fit average adult women.
3) Average adult women detect that the fashionable choice is these brands and feel left out, because a fair number of them would also like to be young and attractive again. And a small but significant fraction feel really left out if some clothing brand calls them a size 20 waist / fat / shaped like a rectangle. Clothing brands detect this in their customer studies and respond appropriately.
4) People who just want clothes buy from H&M or wherever and don't write articles about how hard it is to fit clothes.
"Women" isn't really a homogeneous category when it comes to clothing, there is ongoing fierce competition between lots of different sub-groups of the female population to signal lots of different things. Men have it a bit easier because there is basically a 4-quadrant choice between upper & lower class, formal & casual with a lot of intricacy for people who care a lot about what brand of black leather shoe they own. Young girls are closer to men in that they aren't really trying to signal anything at that age, so clothing fits are a lot easier to manage.
If you are in taller than 95% for men, and reasonably fit, you might need a bigger waistline (think 36 or more), which is still the same length for pants (up to 34) with your socks showing even when standing (depending on your individual proportions), but much wider around hips and legs than you need. I imagine for shorter men, it's the inverse but equally bad.
Some brands will carry slim and extra long trousers, but if I find a model that fits (not all models from the same brand do), I immediatelly buy a few. Otherwise, I try to get tailored stuff, but that's slow and annoying.
For shirts, it's even worse: unless you can find an extra long version, you are going to be wearing a sail and your underpants/ass will pop out when you sit down. But these are easier to get sewed for you as you can just have a single tailor make many of them as needed.
So it's probably easier for median men, but sizes scale exactly the same without regard to actual proportions for simply bigger people.
> I imagine for shorter men, it's the inverse but equally bad.
Not really, as a quite short guy, many shops will offer me to have the clothes fitted, and if not it's pretty trivial to fit them myself. Maybe on the most extreme end of short it's more of an issue, but in general I suspect shortening pants and shirts is signficantly easier than lengthening them.
> Clothing brands detect this in their customer studies and respond appropriately.
Respond how?
> lots of different sub-groups of the female population to signal lots of different things
Signal what?
> Respond how?
By destandardising sizes. It isn't that hard to standardise if an industry thinks it'll help them; the article suggests there is already a relevant standards body. These companies are probably doing it for a reason. My guess would be maybe someone doesn't want to be an XXL 18 at J Crew so they can go to Reformation where they are more of a Regular 14.
> Signal what?
Age, health and status for women. Group membership too although that is generally to a lesser extent.
> By destandardising sizes
Oh. I thought there was an outside chance you intended a positive response. Ah well.
> Age, health and status
I can understand age. But wouldn't everyone want to signal good health and high status?
> I can understand age. But wouldn't everyone want to signal good health and high status?
Yeah, but generally not with fashion. Male fashion tends not to go to the same sort of lengths to showcase legs/torsos/arms/chest that women's fashion does. For men if they want to signal status they tend to buy a car they can't afford or something.
And male health is one of those areas where it is very complicated. A fat, balding man who smells funny can make up for that with a high income. A fat balding woman who smells funny might be able to do the same thing but I can't help feel sceptical at the idea.
Anyway, long story short, the people who aren't using fashion as signalling can just buy a shirt that fits and move on. It's a shirt. They aren't complicated.
There's also the fact that most men aren't very healthy - you'll often see very fit men wearing "revealing" and tight-fitting clothes that show off their muscles etc, whereas everyone else wears less revealing clothes because whatever they may reveal isn't very flattering.
The same is true for most women of course but a lot of them seem to wear revealing clothing regardless of how flattering it actually is.
People with bad health, low status being able to wear the same clothes as young women with good health and status removes the signalling benefit of those clothes.
> But wouldn't everyone want to signal good health and high status?
The thing with people is that they are all different. There are a lot of people who don't want to be of high status or signal it. There's lots of people who don't really care for health and value other things higher.
Definition of "high status" vary by demographics.
Some want to carry X sportswear with prominent branding, others take pride in high-price tag items without any explicit branding.
The "I identify with this athlete", "I identify with this musician", "I dgaf what you think of me" groups probably don't intersect much, with brands and offering catering to these and multiple others...?
Its only a problem for online shopping. In store you can simply grab multiple sizes and see which one fits best. Many online stores try to give multiple measurements of the clothes but even then it's extremely difficult to predict how it will look on you.
Online shoppers seem to solve this issue by just buying multiple items and returning the ones that don't fit. After which the retailer throws these returns in the bin.
In reality its a massive fucking problem. This is why so many women end up wearing men's clothing, which doesn't fit their shape at all, just because they're the only things they can find that they can actually fit into!
What special snowflake part of the world do you live in that any woman can walk into any clothes shop and find clothes that fit? Because I call bullshit on that.
Based on the article, several brands have clothes that range from the low 20s to the mid 50s which covers essentially all waist sizes. If a woman has a 55 inch waist or a 20 inch waist she cannot buy pants at American Eagle but I wouldn’t characterize it as a massive problem. In fact the article identifies exactly where such a woman could find pants.
If you read the article, you've also seen that the proportions do not scale properly. Waste size is not the only important measurement, and as men it would behoove us to seek to understand this issue before going straight to dismissal.
You realize clothes are more than just waist sizes? Pants, for example, need to account for waist, hips, thighs, and length. All of these are very very different ratios on women of different body shapes.
And what you've said actually confirms that what I said is accurate - women can't walk into _any_ clothes shop and find clothes that fit, which is what the poster I replied to said.
Plus, some of the data there is not consistent globally. I don't know a lot of the brands there, but Uniqlo is one we do have and they do not do 3XL in women's clothing here in Australia.
It's also linked to the modern trend of having tightly fitted clothing. You don't have this issue with skirts, or wider, pleated pants with a high waistline. Those clothes were the norm before the 60's, since it's much roomier and allows to fit a wide range of body types.
> It's also linked to the modern trend of having tightly fitted clothing.
Not saying it isn't but the part that's hard to understand is why can't a new brand or a sub brand fix it? It seems almost trivial to label differently, and solve a problem worth solving for and earn money?
And no, don't tell me why existing brand doesn't do it, like all the other replies here.
> you can get in any clothes store and get plenty of clothes to wear
"Getting into the clothes" is a low bar. I can get into this brown paper bag. Comfort is underrated.
> if some women absolutely can't find something in their size from a specific brand, that makes the brand even more exclusive, like it being "for fit people only".
Heh I think mens sizing signals the opposite: too skinny = insufficiently masculine.
Women in my life often voice their frustration with badly fitting bras or pants. In reality, it really is a problem, but it's a problem everyone just accepts.
> if some women absolutely can't find something in their size from a specific brand, that makes the brand even more exclusive, like it being "for fit people only".
This is how many brands originally blow up and grow famous. Especially in Asia.
You make clothing in sizes only extremely slim people can wear.
This is an extremely popular brand that specifically does this, and it's hardly the only one:
Lululemon famously had that 'incident' where they flat out stated their brand just wasn't suitable for fat people. Given their brand identity this makes complete sense, whilst also excluding a large group of people. Expect more of this type of edgy marketing — it is in line with the zeitgeist (consider that eugenic jeans ad).
> in reality it's not much of a problem. Billions of women manage to buy and wear clothes just fine
No. Billions of women don't have any other choice. Take your wife (or even better, mom) shopping for clothes. You'll learn a lot about "manage just fine". Often its a multi-hour slog through all stores trying to find just one item that doesn't look like shit, and fits somewhat well.
I push back on this "it's only a woman problem". How is this any different for men? Re-read this post, but switch the gender. It seems unimportant in the grand scheme of things.
"The grand scheme" consists of many such "small insignificant problems". And no one said it was only a woman problem. And I explicitly called out one of the arguments, not the "degender, men have similar problems etc."
From Dave Barry's Christmas Shopping: a Survivor's Guide (https://davebarry.com/misccol/christmas.htm)
Gifts for Women
Again, you should avoid buying clothes, but not because women don't like clothes. The problem is sizes. First of all, women's clothing sizes don't mean anything. Suppose you're looking at a dress, and the tag says it's a size 14. You could measure that dress with every known measuring instrument, checking for every known unit of measurement, and you would never find any dimension that was 14 anythings long. Not only that, but you would never find any dimension that corresponded to the same dimension on any other size-14 dress. Not only that, but chances are you would never find any woman in the entire world who would admit to being a size 14.
In the "THe VILLaIN aRC oF VANiTY SiZINg" section, vanity sizing is framed as marketing strategy which is successful because of the psychology around that - linking out to https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S10577... for more detail.
It certainly wouldn't be the first time the most profitable marketing strategy is unrelated to aligning with what's optimal for the consumer.
Translating the confusing science speak, basically:
Appearance self-esteem takes a hit when they don't fit in a size. They take it out on the clothes: "I hate their stuff, they suck." They buy more of other stuff to compensate for the hit, whether non-sized accessories (I am pretty) or book/tech (I am smart even if I don't fit).
People confident in their appearance are immune to the effect, and simply think it's sized wrong or runs small.
I am genuinely curious as to which words in the cited are 'confusing science speak' in your view.
Having read the article, I can't venture a guess without feeling condescending...non-conforming? Compensatory?
Legitimately confused.
They use precise but indirect terminology e.g., "heightened level of appearance self-esteem" rather than "confident in their appearance".
Indirect phrasing e.g., "they respond more favorably to products that can help to repair their damaged appearance self-esteem" rather than something direct and easy to understand like "they feel bad that they don't fit, so they end up buying other things like makeup/jewelry to feel better about their appearance".
Maybe it's me, but only the first quote seems cumbersome, and wasn't very cumbersome in the article when I read it in context.
Being able to easily, and quickly read scientific literature is not a universal trait. You're in the top 1% (probably top 0.1%?) if you're able to do that and actually understand the source material.
The average person has a hard time reading and fully understanding a newspaper article or cooking instructions on a pre-prepared meal.
The first paragraph is fine -- I agree. The second paragraph is a silly hyperbole that comes up over and over again on HN and needs to die. Major newspapers are written for about 8th grade level reading comprehension. Cooking instructions on a prep'd meal are probably much lower -- maybe 5th grade. The "average person" (whatever that term means) living in highly developed nations can read at 8th grade level or above.
”I had no issues with complex sentence structure, therefore the whole planet is fluent in english and college-level literate”
Simpler language is an accessibility issue
You can't write "feel bad that they don't fit" in a paper. What do you think this is, the yellow papers?
Why can't you write that? It is much more accurate than their own version since what they wrote is very suggestive while this is just describing what happened.
I think they read the full paper rather than the snippets and agree most couldn't tell you what Cronbach's alpha is, how ANOVA works, or otherwise accurately interpret the meaning of the results sections in a casual read through. One can grab the full paper on resources such as Anna's Archive if they don't have access via a university or such.
Of course, the trick (once you know) is you don't need a comment summarizing it for you. The abstract is alright in a pinch, but the "General Discussion" in psychology papers is the equivalent of "Conclusion" and aims to discuss the results directly. It's still a bit verbose... but the language should at least be very familiar in comparison.
This is the weirdest section, and is just unnecessary virtue signaling.
Women don’t buy their real size because it makes them feel bad -> market pressures companies to address that by doing vanity sizing -> brands bad
I cannot comprehend that jump in the logic.
Not quite “brands bad”.
It’s more that buying clothes across brands becomes confusing for women. That’s a worse outcome for women.
The villain isn’t the brands, it’s the vanity sizing.
Of course education could help about this and other psychologically manipulative tactics by corps but such kind of education is heavily frowned upon for being seeing as anti-capitalist and (more propagandistic) as un-american, so there is zero of such kind of education.
I mourn for the retreat of critical reasoning skills from modern U.S. early education systems.
Thankfully, for most people on Earth, the prospect of seeming "Un-American" is not relevant. It's also not a problem to argue against free-market economies - see Austria's second biggest city (Graz), which has an elected mayor from the communist party.
These seem like uniquely U.S.-American issues.
Education doesn’t help here, what are you talking about?!
Educated people can read as many books as they want about manipulation and still be susceptible to it. The manipulation works on a much deeper emotional level. We can’t change who we are, no matter how much education we get.
Being told by a brand “you’re fat” hurts no matter how many papers you’ve read or published and “you’re still thin and beautiful and desirable!” feels amazing.
I'm pretty sure everyone who cares about getting a good fit (and isn't simply trying the clothes on in person) is looking at measurements, which you can usually find for any half-decent vendor (though it may take some poking around their site). The best have it per-garment (or per-cut), less-good but usually still alright is having a guide to the measurements they base their sizing off of.
Even guys can't really get away with just "Small, Medium, Large" if they want a decent fit that they can predict from just the label. Modifiers for the cut become necessary (regular, slim, relaxed, extra-slim, that kind of thing). And that's for clothes that are pretty forgiving on the fit, like knits...
Women's clothes are even trickier. It's basically impossible to boil them down to one or even two size metrics or labels unless you're relying on a shitload of stretch in every other part of the garment, which is something that usually only very bad garments do (think: Temu). Women's proportions are also far more variable. Shoulder-bust-waist-hip often sees some pretty wild differences, like two women will match on a couple of those measurements and be way far apart on the others. Then you've got height to worry about. Dudes can be similarly far outside the norm of distributions for the relations between their key measurements, but it's not as common—most of us have it relatively easy.
Looking at the actual measurements, though, I've found to be very reliable. I buy almost all my clothes on eBay and directly from brands on their websites, with great success, because I know both my own key measurements, and the dimensions of clothes that fit me well (I have some notes, doesn't take a lot of data points to have enough to be pretty accurate). I've also ordered for my wife with a similar strategy, works well there, though you're way more likely to run into cases of "OK there are zero sizes of this garment that will work for you, just gotta give up on this one" because of the issue above.
Ironically, one area that both genders can have trouble with is crotch seam length, though typically on opposite sides of the garment — but in women’s clothing it’s often worse than men’s due to the spectrum of “extra high rise” to “extra low rise” that’s added to the mix in women’s clothing. Aligning with the hourglass-mostly point of the article, the most common is High Rise, which corresponds to the higher ‘resting point’ on the torso cylinder for a waistband when women have gained fat deposits in the usual rearward hourglass places (as otherwise the waistband sits at a severely sloped angle from back to front). For rectangle or triangle folks, you will rarely find Low Rise or Extra Low Rise that have the appropriately-shortened crotch seam. For spoon folks, you have to shop at shops that cater to spoon shape, because most major retailers only cater to one specific shape and stretch simply isn’t enough to compensate for the rectangular to spoon difference (as Lululemon discovered a decade ago or so). That’s because two women with upper leg circumference 30 may have hip sizes varying from 20 to 60, depending on which body type they have and where their fat deposits are — and the two ends of that spectrum do not indicate anorexia/obesity, either. Body shape and fat levels vary that widely under normal healthy circumstances. I envy men’s jeans for their (relative, but not zero) simplicity.
Now that is an interesting dimension (ha, ha) of this I hadn't yet appreciated. I'm used, as a dude of fortunately-normalish proportions and skinny-enough (but not actually skinny) size, to only looking at a single measurement for rise (crotch to waist, measured on the front of the garment) and getting a really good idea of what I'll be dealing with, just from that. From your description I think I've understood the issue you're highlighting, and yeah, that'd be an annoying extra factor to deal with (and I'm sure it's really hard to get two rise measurements out of anybody, just about ever).
You've got me thinking back to a particular brand and style of (not at all fancy) jeans my wife used to love, that they discontinued, and she's never quite found another that works for her as well. From how she described it, in hindsight, I bet this measurement is the key thing she's not managing to nail on her attempts to find a replacement. Wish she still had a pair, I'd go measure front- and back-rise on them so we'd know what to look for!
If only there was an Anna's Archive for retail clothing dissected into clothing patterns..
If only, but wouldn't dimensions work just as well as pattern/silhouette visualizations? And finding retail dimensions is the hard part.
Hey, how close are we to being able to 3d print our own clothing?
Show me a sewing machine that can cut, sew, hem, iron, and qacheck a stretch-fabric garment, and I’ll show you a trillion dollar domestic manufacturing opportunity! Until then, look up the object called “sewing pattern”; it’s just a clothes blueprint that assumes you only have a 2D printer (scissors or a pizza cutter) and need a physical guide for the 2D fabric cutter (which will be you), an instruction sheet for sewing (also you), and the assumption that you understand that you should have ironed the fabric beforehand (throw it out and start over). Sewing is an extremely old human craft and may perhaps be the most difficult challenge faced by industrial robotics. Threading a loom for woven fabrics is equally as difficult and is still done by hand, too. Note that most clothing doesn’t fit in a normal desktop cutter because fabrics are typically 40” wide so you end up having to escort the entire process using tool-assisted human labor. They have, at least, figured out how to make robotic top-sewing machines for quilts, so as long as your stitches are in 2D and the fabric is already sewn together, you can have it sew the linear mile of stitches to finish the quilt (but only after weeks to month of piecework and assembly).
Ironically I think the hourglass high-rise means I can wear (some) women's pants without tightness in the crotch, and the extra back rise is great when sitting.
eBay? Can you elaborate? Do you mean used clothes like on Poshmark? And does eBay really publish decent clothes measurements?
> Women's clothes are even trickier
Oh that explains why my wife spends so much time obsessing over clothes: trying clothes, buying/returning, buying others, etc. I'm sure a few others can relate.
And she's got a very normal BMI: not underweight, just plain in the middle (5'5" / 124 lbs: something like that) and a very hour-glassy/feminine shape, so many clothes are "made" to her shape/size/weight. I can't imagine what it'd be if she had uncommon "dimensions".
Yeah, the amount of time and energy it takes to find one single piece of clothing that fits at all can exceed the amount of time some people invest in deciding whether to buy a car, what car to buy, and actually buying the car combined. It’s infuriating and humiliating to have the entire marketplace treat you like your body isn’t worth the time of day to for-profit corporations, the most greedy construct available to humanity today. You start to wonder if you’re as worthless as the industry apparently considers you after having to return the fifth pair of jeans for some error in fit that summarizes as ‘the jeans are mediocre median and you are not’.
That's what sizing guides are theoretically for, if you add more sizing systems it gets even more confusing. I don't think the issue is as bad as the post portrays it though. Its true that sizes can be all over the place but like I am size small woman's and if I buy small most of the time it will fit or at least somewhat fit. I am not a standard model size either as I need things that are for more hourglass figure rather than straight but that just requires being selective about which styles to buy. A medium also usually fits if I need something looser. I double check the reviews if its online or try it on in person and as long as its not something that requires precise measurements its usually fine. For things like jeans I shop in person and try things on from a few sizes or just know approximate size I am or rely on reviews. Many items these days are stretchy and even when they don't fit perfectly they are wearable or you can return them, its not that complicated. I do only shop a few brands or from in person stores or I can often approximate sizing from how big something looks or by looking at review photos.
The pockets thing is similar, not having pockets is annoying but its not that big of a deal. I rather buy something cute without pockets than search for something with some. If it has them great, if it doesnt oh well I will just use my purse. Barely anything fits in pockets anyways and I have a feeling other women feel similarly which is why many of us buy things whether or not they have pockets.
There are fast fashion attempts at this like adding elastic material to every fabric so they can get away with having fewer sizes and cuts thus less unsold inventory and availability issues. But everything has a tradeoff. In this case the elastic material degrades MUCH faster than cotton so you have to throw away your jeans quite a bit earlier compared to a quality 100% cotton denim which can last you a decade. This is very unfortunate as most of the fabric in that piece of clothing is perfectly fine and this is pure waste.
I don't know about the womens side but on the male side, I recently discovered https://www.tailorstore.com/ and am trying them out for some t-shirts. I'm an odd shape and always struggle to get good fitting clothes so hoping this might be a solution.
I wonder if understanding a particular brand's sizing drives up repeat purchases.
Yes. This is specifically a driver for having brand-specific sizing: knowing what size I am in Wooland Jade does nothing whatsoever to help me assess a potentially cheaper option in Uniqlo Whatever. It's the same lock-in effect as cloud APIs, only implemented through attributes instead. Imagine the chaos in the guitar market if the "bass" in "bass guitar" had up to +/-25% variation between guitar manufacturers — it would be a total nightmare trying to cross-shop guitars away from your current one, and lots of people would just end up glued to a brand so they don't have to do the hard work of assessing 'is this within +/-5% of the bass that fits me now'.
Speaking for myself as a bloke, yes, 100%. If I know stuff from a particular brand fits me well, I’m going to buy more from that brand.
100%. For a time whoever the gap shirt designers measured up for their XL size must've exactly matched my build and height, and had extra long arms the same length as mine. So it was an easy way to get a shirt that fit right, for me.
I always find it frustrating that most stores turn over their stock so often. I find a shirt I like then go back to buy another and it's gone.
Yes but it’s multiple dimensions other than just waistline. e.g Some brands make boxier shirts and others use longer cuts.
Because “my style” prefers one over the other, I know when I buy from a certain brand so it’s going to fit on me better.
If if waistlines were standardized it wouldn’t really account for all the other measurements.
There's also different definitions of waistline size. Pant sizes "lie" because historically most pants sat further up your waist, now that many of them sit on your hips, they give you a measurement as if they were still sitting higher up so you can compare between the fits with the same number.
Really the only bulletproof solution here is to just go try them on in store and see which fits best.
Your question implies the answer. It's probably not a problem that's worth solving. The industry found the most cost optimal way of sizing stuff that works for most people at the desired price and the rest is either served through misfits, alterations or boutiques. Clothing is not some niche forgotten industry where most obvious opportunities still exist.
I think the market opportunity can be a standard and eventually get labels to include your standard in addition to their traditional labeling.
Figure out the variables (like shape, inseam, width, whatever else) for each article of clothing. Then freely distribute this and begin to catalog popular items. You can crowdsource some of this. The idea is people will look up the clothes as per your scale.
Then after you index a lot of clothes, you can search by exact measurements and then you can hit up clothing manufacturers to use their propriety code in their marketing or promote their brands on your site.
This works in theory, until you discover as the article did, that all manufacturers use one clothing shape — hourglass — and so if your measurements aren’t “bust == hips, waist := bust - 10” then your search engine finds few or no results.
As a bloke I think I can see one reason why - I buy sports kit the model looks good in but I won’t. Every damn time! Then end up buying again.
Then just try it out and if does not look good don’t buy it.
I believe that’s how most of us try clothes out. It’s not only a matter of body shape, but also skin color, hair color, facial hair, face shape, hair cut…
You always need to try out the clothes before buying…
People buy heavy SUV when compact car would do, "dress for the job you want", "temporarily embarrassed millionaires", nationalistic fervor for your country getting more territory when even with the current one you don't know what to do, and so forth... Humans are an aspirational animal, and it is pretty easy to sell into that aspiration be it a ticket to Moon or a nice looking on the model jacket :)
To the commenter below:
Exactly. The societies where aspirations have been dampened or completely suppressed have been collectivistic and/or totalitaristic - USSR, North Korea, etc. - ie. where individual will is totally suppressed.
Mankind is aspirational when we are allowed to act as individuals. The silent majority has a different character because it's a simpler animal.
>"Sizes are all made up anyway — why can’t we make them better?"
I will settle for making them consistent. Multiple times, I have ordered the same clothing in the same size from the same webpage in different colors, and some colors fit, and the others do not.
I am surprised that a women's clothing startup prioritizing pockets big enough for smartphones hasn't usurped the incumbents. I would have figured the convenience of being able to store a device that people have their heads down in 95% of the time would be sufficient to supersede more vanity related motivations.
AFAIK, this is because clothes are generally made by cutting pieces out of massive stacks of fabric of heaps of layers, and the cutting process is never perfectly straight - the pieces at the bottom of the pile will be very different than those at the top.
So much this for consistency. I remember one particular bad occasion I went shopping for trousers in a store. I tried five, each had something wrong in relation with the size numbers.
First didn’t fit because it was too tight, so I tried one size larger. This one was even smaller than the previous one. So I tried an even bigger one which was only taller. Tried a bigger number now it was way too big. So for fun I tried one with a higher number which turned out to be smaller than the previous one.
When I asked the store assistant, they shrugged and said that was just reality and why you need to try every item individually. It has to do with how much “spare” cloth the seamstress takes when stitching the trousers together, if the original piece of cloth was even already cut to size properly.
These days I buy from the brand own size, the same item and it fits every time.
Used to know someone who worked for a mass production company, outsourcing big clothing orders for UK supermarkets.
It's common for clothing producers (Designers were in the UK in this case, clothes made in china or otherwise) to just pick whoever is in the design office that's about the right size and use them as the basis of all sizing measurements for a given size.
I've even heard of a petite woman being used as the size model for boys 11-12 age supermarket clothes. There's very little thought involved, it's just convenience to be able to tailor the template garment to a real person who's nearby.
I’ve only seen that issue in extremely cheap, China-made, clothing.
It helps to buy high quality, and expensive, clothing. Sizing is consistent, and shape stays after multiple washes.
Googling BIFL in Reddit helps a lot.
In my experience with womens clothing having pockets does not mean they are very practical for phones. Phones are heavy and they can drag pants or skirt/dress down if they are stretchier or don't have a tight waistband which is most of them. If the pocket goes too far down or is too loose or too big the phone ends up too far down and jiggles around which is quite annoying and uncomfortable. Or in items like jeans where the pocket is well designed the phone still sticks out of the top and yet when I bend my knee it jams into my hip in a weird way or I cant sit down with it in my pocket. I am 5'1 so I may just be hitting some size limitations but carrying around a phone in a purse or sticking it into the waistband of tighter pants can be more comfortable than trying to use pockets.
Even as a guy who wears pretty loose straight-cut jeans, having stuff in my pockets can look and feel weird. Especially my AirPods case. In jeans with slightly stretchy denim, the location of my phone is permanently etched into my jeans. I'd be a pickpocket's dream. When I had the unfortunate inclination to wear tight pants, anything in the pockets looked and felt quite bad.
I'm a big fan these days of a small crossbody bag (aka a sling bag). MY problem is that the pockets on my pants are too large and loose and I don't want to worry about things absently falling out when I sit.
Uniqlo makes a solid one for $25. It's light, comfortable, and unobtrusive. Admittedly, it's not ideal for all styles or situations, but I love that it's large enough for items that are definitely too large or uncomfortable for a pocket, like a book, small notebook, or an accessory.
https://www.uniqlo.com/us/en/products/E486766-000/00?colorDi...
I started bringing a crossbody bag and now I find I drag half the house everywhere like one of those every day carry people because why not, it's so easy to carry stuff compared to using pockets. Very useful to have a battery bank and cables with you.
In women's clothes, if you're trying to target Generic Woman, you often have to put deep pockets somewhere other than the front of thigh, because for various compositional reasons that area isn't reliably available across women's various body shapes. This is how we ended up with one of the coolest innovations in pockets since leggings: the side leg pocket. Everyone has a side leg. You can put a pocket there and it's perceptually irrelevant to people. Some of my skirts have pockets designed along these same lines that can hold an entire Nintendo Switch with controllers attached and it's effectively invisible if I'm sitting in a chair, because no one notices when my thighs are a bit thicker on one side. In leggings it's blindingly obvious that there's a phone there, but leggings are typically bodycon-tight to begin with, so I just view it as "yup, that's a phone pocket" when I even remember where I put my phone at all.
back waist pocket = mind blown
standard back pocket = disaster
I've ripped quite a few pants (2? 3?) getting up when the phone in the back pocket gets caught on something. And these were pants I considered "heavy duty".
side-leg pocket = ungainly
Knees and by extension thighs move more than hips, and so items in side pockets tend to bounce around and pull down the waistline, when normally they wouldn't in regular pockets.
In my opinion the best pocket is the breast pocket on jackets and heavier garments. I guess if I were a cop I'd prefer the shoulder holster.
Yeah, back waist pocket works incredibly well if you have a 'rear bust', so to speak — the waist-to-hip curve angle can be quite severe relative to men. I have bicyclist thighs so an extra quarter inch on one side is completely invisible — but the placement of jacket pockets is incompatible with my torso shape. I believe(?) on many women's jackets they come out of the factory sewn shut by default so that they don't gape from the angular pressure.
If you think you can pull it off, I've become a strong proponent of blazers and sport coats. I call them "wearable purses for men".
For me, this is basically an evolution and refinement of what I guess I've always been trying to do. As a teen, I'd wear un- or partially-buttoned button-up shirts over my t-shirts. Later, zip hoodies as much of the year as I could get away with. I'd also be sad during this whole period when it'd get too warm and I couldn't get away with wearing a coat everywhere (and it got too warm for a hoodie, once I adopted those) and I'd have to go back to putting my stuff in my trouser pockets. That just sucks.
Now, I've gone to blazers and sport coats, which to me feel like a very similar idea but are wildly more practical[1] for most situations I find myself in, and most folks perceive them as looking a lot better, too.
I've found the heavier winter fabrics to be the easiest to pull off. Simple tweeds, or I've got this one really heavy but soft wool twill in grey-black that works great. Corduroy (there are wool corduroys, too!) covers fall really well, and can do for the cooler parts of spring, too.
Summer is trickier. Unlined Summer-weight wools can add effectively zero heat (and keep some of the sun off you!) but may look too formal, especially when nobody else is wearing a jacket of any kind. Really schlubby unstructured cotton, or a simple linen jacket can work without looking "too fancy", but they're a bit high-maintenance if you don't want them to look wrinkled to hell all the time. I haven't quite found what I'd call a perfect solution for me, here.
[1] Why are they more practical? A blazer or sport coat can usually dress pretty far up, and pretty far down, so has better situational range than a hoodie. I also find the pocket layout is just a ton better. My standard way to wear them is keys in left-hip, phone in right-hip, wallet in left-inner-breast. Generally, these leave tons of room in all three pockets concerned for cramming change or receipts or whatever, none of them are crowded. When traveling, I'll give a whole pocket to my passport, right-inner-breast if that one's big enough, or I might give that to my left hip if I don't need my keys (like when flying or taking a train). Sunglasses can go in the outer breast pocket. Hip pockets are usually big enough to temporarily cram leather or knit-wool gloves in, for the winter, when I need to take those off but don't have anywhere to put them, without overcrowding the pockets enough to cause a problem. I can double up my keys and a big ID/keycard in the left hip, when I need to go into the office, still not crammed tight or anything. The hip pockets are also great for those "pocket size" paperback books, and you can even fit stuff like Modern Library hardcovers in there as long as they're not super-thick volumes, especially the older editions that had smaller dimensions.
I appreciate the discussion. I'm always looking for ways to look better, although you wouldn't know it because I'm unkempt and wear old clothes. But fantasy me dresses really well.
> and keep some of the sun off you!
This has become really important to me in the last few years after I realized the impact sunlight has on people's skin (I always think of this [1] or just generally the people I know who don't care about sun exposure). I'm not sure what my ideal summer look will be since I look best in sporty clothing, but don't intend to spend long periods of time with large parts of my skin exposed to direct summer sunlight any longer. The face and back of the neck is the hardest part to fashionably keep safe.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/trucker-accumulates-skin-damage...
You might also appreciate research into the French accesory 'pochette', which is approximately like a women's clutch in the U.S. except without the gender-specifics (as translations 'folder' or 'case' suggest). Might have to site:fr a search in order to get ungendered results, though.
For me the back pockets are usually good enough to hold the phone when I'm walking then i just put it wherever (bag, table, bike mount, etc) the rest of the time. I wouldn't keep it in my front pocket even if it did fit.
re: consistency
I don't think that xkcd applies. I mean if I am on a clothing seller's website, and they show me a pair of pants and I add 4 colors to the cart of the same size of the same design/model number/style pants, I feel like they should all fit the same.
They usually do, never found that issue on medium to high quality clothing (!= luxury brands).
I have. So I don't buy that it's not a problem just because you haven't had it..
Sometimes they also use different fabric for different colors. Maybe a color is internally consistent, but if you buy one of each they're very different.
same, I wonder why this is. Is it just that modelling / marketing is more effective with things as they presently are? It seems there is a market for better fitting clothes -- likely half (or more!) of clothes bought would make the end customer happier if the items just had a better fit. Why have financial incentives not achieved this?
I mean, I get that it sucks online, but in person? Who cares what the label says? I'm an adult. I can easily tell by looking at a garment how it's going to fit me.
That said, if we could just get the critical measure online that'd be fantastic. No need for sizes, I know how big inches and centimeters are.
And, as it turns out, my favorite retailers do in fact include measurements, but I'd rather have a few quality items than lots of garbage, which is also why I own a sewing machine because sometimes I really love a dress but the manufacturer doesn't accommodate my specific frame. I developed this practice when I was broke and shopping out of thrift stores. It allowed me to buy almost anything and tailor it to make it fit. Really broadens your fashion horizons.
With regard to why sizing is difficult, I'd guess it's just consumer laziness or cognitive dissonance. Although it's maybe a little bit of efficiency too. How many models should I produce (and how many lines do I have to run) to fit every woman just right instead of lying to all of them? For pants alone, if you really want it to actually fit, you're going to need ankle, calf, knee, thigh, inseam/outseam, glute, hip, and waist (and crotch to waistband if you're offering different rises). So if you've got even just 5 measurements (probably not enough as no way do all women fit tailored within 5 different calf sizes), you've got 5^9 different products (and therefore machine configurations) to cover just that space, because yes there are women with massive calfs and small thighs or same waist/hip or whatever combination you can imagine) and that's all just for literally one style. If you've got five different pants that's immediately 5^9.
Lots of (american) women are perfectly fine with their 36in underbust but would be shamed to admit they need a 46in hip with their 32in waist for all that ass. Much better to just lie and say I need an 8 which will not in any world ever make it over my butt.
Maybe we can compromise on a 'call it' measurement which is on average 2 less than the prevailing standard would suggest. If your countries' system would have you in a 8, you can 'call it a 6', and then we're all happy.
The pockets issue is even more blatant since a lot of women would like to put their phones in their front pockets.
> Like, why doesn't the market solve for this?
If you shop online and use raw measurements, then it will both fit and be available.
The real concern I have is how the large majority of westerners are overweight or obese. That's a serious issue way beyond the practicality of buying clothes
You are assuming that listed raw measurements online are accurate (they rarely are).
Or that individual pieces of a garment are consistent, which they aren't. Only if you buy in to the more expensive brands.
> The real concern I have is how the large majority of westerners are overweight or obese
This doesn't tell the whole story either. In Europe, for example, plenty of women are within the "healthy" BMI range, for example, but their muscle- and fat-distribution is such that various clothes made for normal weight do not fit.
For example, for some women, finding pants which are both large enough at the hips, and thin enough at the waist, is a nightmare. You can be well into the bottom range of healthy weight, like closer to underweight, and still have clothes for normal weights be WAY too tight, because of fat and muscle distribution and build.
> If you shop online and use raw measurements, then it will both fit and be available.
I'm a man often shopping for bike wear in Europe. I'm neither overweight or obese. The article is right that sizing is a complete mess: with my 180cm and 74kg I'm usually mass market size M in tops and L in pants because I just have a big ass (again I'm not fat, I still have a big ass when I'm 70kg during the height of the summer season). But it's often an S in tops. Anyway, in the bike brands sizing, the tops are mostly M to L.
The bike pants? I have already sent back XXL's because I just couldn't put them on. But for some brands, I'm still L, for others it's XL. The measurements don't mean anything, they are completely off quite often. The only half-usable help is customer reviews where people note their measurements and the size that fit them. Also the sizing is not only inconsistent between brands, but also for different items of the same brand.
One thing I don't really understand is the brands perspective. If someone with my measurements is forced to wear XL (and for long pants the legs are often too long as a result), what is left? Will a guy 185 cm high weighting 90kg, which is not uncommon, be forced to wear an XXXL (if they make this size, which they usually don't)? Do they look at this and think it's good sizing nomenclature?
These clothing companies are based (if no longer producing) in different regional markets, so focussing on e.g. the average Italian cycling enthusiast, which will be quite different to the average Dutch, American etc.
I've found myself not even considering brands where I've found inconsistent sizing, but going back again and again to ones I can reliably pick a size and know it'll fit, no returns.
> so focussing on e.g. the average Italian cycling enthusiast, which will be quite different to the average Dutch, American etc.
I have seen this explanation a lot and frankly I doubt that very much (The XXL I had to return was a Belgian brand). I think it's not the body size difference in regional market but rather the Italian market for example may be used to different size designations. But then they sell to other markets too, so they should sort this thing out. I simply can't buy anything from Castelli when the reviews say 'buy 2 or 3 sizes larger than the measurements say'.
> but going back again and again to ones I can reliably pick a size and know it'll fit
I wish those existed for my garments. Sizing is inconsistent between Assos Equipe RS and Mille GT lines, between newer and older Isadore pants, between newer and older Endura pants...
Semi-related thing that suprises me as a man (this is in Europe):
I go to a clothing shop at the start of a new collection, and look at men's shirts for a given type:
- there's 10 XS, 10 M, 10 XXL versions
I go towards end of the season:
- there's like 1 M remaining, but 8 XS, 8 XXL.
Like if they were surprised and had no data that most population is M.
My impression is that at the end of the season, there's like 0 XXL, and 8XS, and 8Ms, but maybe that's just a perception problem.
I had subscribed to clearance sale newsletters from quite a few retailers but unsubscribed when I noticed they put stuff in the outlet section only when they run out of sizes S to L.
At a previous employer this was a problem we identified (and larger retailer customers) had recognised, although for other reasons. We had developed a size recommendation system for them, that used real product measurements in every size and a method of obtaining your body measurements from fully clothed photos. We also offered a statistical average measurement set for those who couldn’t/wouldn’t take photos of themselves (privacy was important to us, and there was no need to undress).
We were able to give details about fit comfort across many measurements for each size, but this feature was basically unused. 99% of users used the statistical average body of themselves instead of themselves, which actually exacerbates the body type problem.
Another interesting thing about the industry and the grading process we learned; many retailers had no measurements for their own clothes except the reference size. This was much more common of higher end brands.
1 last thing; some global brands actually have the same size name on the same product represent a different size in different region (eg an SKU in size S in US may have different measurements to the same SKU in S in Asia)
There's also a surprising lack of consistency item-to-item. More than once I have grabbed two of the same pants (same model, same size label, next to each other on the rack) and one would fit well while the other was way too large or way too small.
This is a QA issue, the factory makes sizes to a pattern. But to be fast, they don't cut it out that accurately or sew it that accurately. So you end up with big variance from size to size.
In order to get fast fashion made cheaply and quickly, corners are (left) uncut.
If the author reads this, I think it would be great to use international units as an option, and perhaps by default.
I have no idea about imperial units so it’s a difficult read.
What ticks me off in this is the statement, that a certain body shape is “unattainable for most”. I’m pretty sure the author does not have the data to back this up. Difficult? Yes. Requiring commitment? Absolutely. Unattainable? No. I really don’t care what body shape anyone is comfortable with. But as someone, who has struggled hard all his life not to be obese, I find it irresponsible to outright declare something that’s absolutely doable by anyone as “unattainable”. Being able to attain it might be someone’s only hope and it’s just wrong to take it away.
You're wrong. They even explicitly call out that it's not about weight. Everyone has different proportions.
> Once I compared my personalized sloper to commercial patterns and retail garments, I had a revelation: clothes were never made to fit bodies like mine. It didn’t matter how much weight I gained or lost, whether I contorted my body or tried to buy my way into styles that “flatter” my silhouette, there was no chance that clothes would ever fit perfectly on their own. Finally I understood why.
Later they show how J.Crew has a certain ration between hip/waist for all sizes. Even if you had the same sized waist, chances are you wouldn't have the same sized hips as they expect. Most bodies just aren't that shape.
Body shape is not only about obesity, or fat, and I think it's obvious the author don't talk about this when speaking of body shape.
Not sure. That level of size variance where the median falls off the middle seems to indicate a large extent of obese people.
The distribution in Japan would be very different.
Maybe, but for sure the range of total size would be very different if everyone in the study was in shape.
It'd be interesting to see this study repeated after a decade of GLP-1 drugs being available (and cheaper).
There is the fundamental thing of skeletal structure and build though - people naturally are entirely different shapes, regardless of fat or excess weight, wich is what the comment is mostly referring to in my eyes.
I'm built very tall and very spindly, so there are certain body shapes that I will never have (or want, but that's a different question) purely from the point of view that my body just isn't the right base shape to produce them.
There's a European standard designed to fix this, which just uses body measurements, although I've never seen it used. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joint_European_standard_for_si...
Women's sizing is so dumb. They could just provide inches or cm like they do for the men, but for some reason (well for marketing reasons, as discussed extensively in the article), they use these random sizes and numbers that aren't consistent and change over time.
I think this is why stretchy materials are getting more and more popular. The women in my house use stretchy pants almost exclusively, because they are much more forgiving with body shape. As long as the waist fits, the rest will fit well enough.
Mens sizes have changed over time. Go get a vintage t-shirt from the 80s, medium size, and try it on. It'll be the size of a small or xs today.
I meant more the pants and dress shirts, which are sized in inches.
> pants are sized in inches
I wish! That number is kinda-sorta-related-to inches, but it's not, at least not anymore. I wear a 31 or 32 jean, but my waist is about 34.5 inches. And any jeans which fit my thighs properly (turns out to be about size 34) will fall off my waist.
Measure your own waist and pants, see what you find!
Sizing is chaos.
I assume you are talking jean sizes, which might be related to inches in some historical sense, but now it's more abstract.
However dress pants, sports pants and everything that isn't pants is just as bad as for women.
you're right! i just try the clothes i used to wear as a toddler, it's ridiculous how much they don't fit
it's not always necessarily about people being fat but also about style, tighter t-shirts where more in fashion back in 70/80s, not it's more loose style
>Women's sizing is so dumb. They could just provide inches or cm like they do for the men, but for some reason (well for marketing reasons, as discussed extensively in the article), they use these random sizes and numbers that aren't consistent and change over time.
Relevant: TIL that while male rowers are classified as "lightweight" or "heavyweight", larger female rowers are called "openweight" instead of "heavyweight". <https://np.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/32p2ka/til_th...>
Lightweight rowing is pretty much dead, anyways.
It was originally introduced to give countries with shorter people a chance to compete (as rowing depends a lot on height), but in practice it mainly resulted in promising candidates who didn't quite make the cut for heavyweight being forced into eating disorders.
Lightweight rowing has been cut from the olympics already, so to a lot of organisations it has lost its relevance. There are still world championships, but I bet it is only a matter of time before it'll disappear there as well.
[flagged]
To be clear, you’re advocating for women to lose the right to vote? The misogyny in this thread was disappointing already, but seeing this comment being voted up is maybe a sign I should not be on this website any more.
Voted up?
If you mean the troll post didn't immediately fade with one downvote that might just be a matter of having two accounts.
Interesting visualizations, but I don't understand what the thesis is. To me, the conclusion says:
1. Luxury fashion thrives on exclusivity, which is exclusionary.
2. Clothing size standards do not match diverse body types.
3. There is no sizing standard, and companies size however they want.
0. All commercial premade adult women’s clothing is made exclusively for a small minority of women with hourglass body shapes.
The number one thesis takeaway for me, that I didn’t realize as a woman even after years of dealing with sizing drama, is that clothing manufacturers exclusively market to hourglass body shape alone — which some might recognize better as “pinup model” proportions. As a non-hourglass along with the vast majority of other U.S. women, it’s quite the shock to discover that megacorps are targeting a fraction of the market (hourglass) rather than the largest segment (rectangle).
I think that must be fashion dependent though? I can think of plenty of women's clothes that are definitely not marketed for hourglass physiques.
Yeah I've shopped for clothes enough for my wife to know that even with an hourglass shape, you're guaranteed to find lots of pieces that're like "OK none of these sizes will work on you". Her particular problem is a small waist paired with an hourglass. Plenty of "ruler"-shaped cuts out there on the small end of waist size, that won't work for her.
I wouldn't be surprised if women of every body shape believe that clothes must be targeting some other shape, except the ones who luck into a sizing-region in which multiple body types have a lot of overlap.
I can think of three major markets right now:
Rectangle (athletics-branch brands), Hourglass (most entire fashion brands), and what I believe is Spoon but could be another shape (e.g. Kardashian).
If I want to buy something I see in Vanity Fair magazine, and it fits me, then I will be buying:
- Rectangle: athleticwear or athletics-adjacent, OR ‘petite’ sizes only
- Spoon: bodycon stretch, primarily
- Hourglass: 95% of the page surface area of the magazine
Other magazines vary this formula, but VF is representing the same three body type divisions that are endemic in U.S. clothing. I think the article fails somewhat in this regard, but I honestly don’t consider it a flaw; they make a solid point and the limited niche exceptions are explicitly ‘niche only’ in the industry in favor of hourglass. I’m pretty certain I can find one niche retailer for any given triplet of { measurements, body shape, aesthetic style } — and it’s the introduction of that third component that reveals the problem. For any given style, say plaid or paisley or bodycon or flowy or “any color that isn’t red, gray, black, or white”, given a set of measurements and a body shape, there may only be one retailer known nationwide to serve that market. Torrid and Long Tall Sally both thrive in their respective triplets’ niches, but if you want clothes that fit you and are styled differently than the one retailer offers, it’s tailoring or nothing. (Incidentally, there’s a severe labor shortage of tailors in the tailoring industry as all the skilled workers are aging out of the workforce, same as CPAs in the accounting industry, so good luck finding one at a reasonable price!)
I have difficulties believing that what you’re describing is actually the case. Free markets are extremely good at covering many market niches, but free market is exceptional when it comes to cover the majority of the market.
If that majority of rectangular-shaped women existed and wanted to buy rectangular-shaped clothes, we would see brands with that product everywhere.
So either they’re not majority or they are happy enough with the existing product designs so they won’t buy an alternative rectangular design.
4. Women are the biggest they have ever been in history.
As a 152lb American male, I weigh 11% less than the average American woman.
Here's an asumption:
When you get into the overweight category, sizing becomes a lot more difficult, because then the ratios that are relatively standard for non overweight bodies (like waistline to tallness) completely break down.
So now you don't need just one parameter, but at least two: waist and tallness. And this causes the number of different sizes to explode. So instead of (S, M, L, XL, XXL, XXXL, XXXXL), you'll need (S, M, L, XL, XXL, XXXL) waist x (S, M, L, XL, XXL, XXXL) length. And it becomes unmanageable for brands to cover all the different sizes without having a large amount of waste.
Men trousers and shirts do this, because generally men fashion don't change that fast, so the brands can carry many models for a longer time period.
It’s worse for women, than men, but all tweens/teens have this issue, and it drives parents nuts. Also, these kids are chronically insecure, and the need to be "fashionable" is intense. I remember hating JNCO pants, for my daughter. To be fair, at least they were baggy.
I have similar issues with shoes, and I’m in my 60s. My wife refuses to buy me shoes.
If I buy Clarks, I’m size 9. If I buy New Balance, I’m size 10.5. If I buy Hoka, I’m size 11. It’s crazy.
I was surprised recently when browsing on Amazon (I rarely buy clothing/shoes there, but I did a few times).
I chose my usual size, but Amazon told me "nope we think you want one size smaller, based on your history and our data for this product".
"The average woman’s waistline today is nearly 4 inches wider than it was in the mid-1990s."
I assume they mean circumference rather than diameter, but this is still a shocking increase in only 30 years. I knew the obesity epidemic was an ever-increasing problem, but this really puts it into perspective. I wonder if we'll ever fully understand the causes behind this rapid shift.
Someone (not me obviously) should look it up, because I would think that if it was circumference, it would be "4 inches longer" not wider. Because that case, ...wow.
part of it is just raw obesity increase, but part is also an aging population. even if women today WERE the same size as women of the same age 30 years ago, the average over the total population would still be up.
Mostly though it's the obesity increase.
40% of Americans are obese, and 75% are overweight. 30 years ago only 20% were obese.
This is what I was beginning to think around the "nobody's actually hourglass" section.
I thought it would be worth looking at what the definitions are:
https://www.ergo-eg.com/uploads/books/devarajan_full_106_04%...
> Hourglass. A subject would fall into this shape category when there is a very small difference in the comparison of the circumferences of her bust and hips AND if the ratios of her bust-to-waist and hips-to-waist are about equal and significant (Simmons, 2002)
> Rectangle. A rectangular subject would have her bust and hip measure fairly equal AND her bust-to-waist and hip-to-waist ratios low. She would not possess a clearly discernible waistline (Simmons, 2002)
Over here (E.U) I'd say most women definitely would be "hourglass shaped" in some way more than any other shape - maybe some would be a tie with "rectangle" but I'm breaking the tie by saying it's fair to say hourglass does not mean wasp-waist either - so I couldn't reconcile my anecdotal observation from the stated facts until it dawned on me that this was U.S stats.
> One 2007 study found that half of women (49%) in the U.S. were considered rectangle-shaped. Only 12% of women had a true hourglass figure.
OK let's dig data:
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/hestat/obesity_adult_07_08/obe...
> Results from the 2007–2008 National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES), using measured heights and weights, indicate that an estimated 34.2% of U.S. adults aged 20 years and over are overweight, 33.8% are obese, and 5.7% are extremely obese.
And apparently it's worse for women (35.5% obese) than men (32% obese).
Anyway I'm not sure what "true hourglass" is supposed to even mean (wasp-waist?); according to the definition you got some waistline + balanced hip and shoulders => you're hourglass. If you start using "rectangle" as a fallback when in doubt then of course it's going to rate higher.
Funnily enough the very study linked is a comparison with another country (Korea):
https://www.emerald.com/ijcst/article-abstract/19/5/374/1249...
Increasing weight with age must be an American thing. My observations in my friends circle and family circle outside of US is that we have all kept same size (1 up/down) since early adulthood.
Ah, yeah, the aging population is a good point.
I can't find a citation now, but I recall reading at some point that weight gain with age (in adulthood) didn't used to happen very much before the obesity epidemic, though nowadays we take it as a given. I wish I could find a source for/against that idea, I'm curious now if it's true.
There are some theories. Most fresh food in a generic U.S. supermarket has something like 10-25% of the nutrients per pound than it used to a hundred years ago, thanks to soil depletion, so each generation has to consume more pounds of food to get the same amount of nutrients. There’s been long-standing corruption in the FDA “food pyramid” and “recommended daily allowance” systems to bias the U.S. population from recognizing that added sugar leads to obesity. And there’s the advent of chemical non-sugar sweeteners, which in recent decades are turning out to be just as harmful as sugar, only differently. Those may not fully explain obesity, but they certainly are known and understood explanations for obesity — and yet they remain wholly unaddressed.
I think the problem is not whether we’ll fully understand the causes, but more that every cause we have identified to date would require regulating corporations in profit-damaging ways to solve, and it is likely that any future causes we reveal will be the same. That’s anathema in the U.S.: profits are sacrosanct to the two primary political parties, discounting their occasional extremists who argue (correctly) that we should be regulating in favor of consumers, not profits. Typically, the desire for a ‘full’ explanation is used to delay or derail efforts to implement solutions to each single proven explanation, and so I tend to caution against pursuing a complete answer first, and instead recommend asking why we have not yet addressed the known causes while continuing to search for more.
Similar to a sibling comment,
>>the advent of chemical non-sugar sweeteners, which in recent decades are turning out to be just as harmful as sugar, only differently.
requires citations. People lump sugar substitutes together as one class of drugs, but they very much are not. Some are sugar alcohols, some are glycosides, others are different molecules. Different molecules have different mechanisms of action and paths of metabolism.
Much like one might take a "blood pressure" medication, it is a large umbrella consisting of chemically distinct ACE-inhibitors, ARBs, thiazide diuretics, loop diuretics, calcium channel blockers (dihydropyridine and non-dihydropyridine distinctly), and more. These drugs generally do have class effects, but the class effects from an ACE inhibitor (bradykinin cough, angioedema, etc) are quite different from diuretics (hyponatremia, frequent urination, etc). One person's 'blood pressure medicine' is not the same as the next.
I agree that the prevalence of sugar substitutes in the western diet demands scrutiny, and I am concerned about their effects, however any current research lumping them all together without strict attention to pharmacological mechanisms supported by translational research is worse than useless - it is misleading.
In the sense of what we 'know' about modern medicine, we 'know' almost nothing about sugar substitutes. The body of evidence is vanishingly thin. I want more research into this topic, but right now, it's just not there.
I'm not providing citations for my tangent here; it's too far off-thread and I'm investing my academic research free time into WtHR instead (see elsethread).
There is no source supporting your claim of nutrient decline in that magitude thanks to soil depletion. It's mostly due to modern crops that grow tall fast, and are thus mostly made up of water.
Some argue that it’s instead because we’ve promoted food strains that have more sugars and less nutrients, and I’m still studying that, so I have no position to offer about it yet. Brussels sprouts is a good example of doing this in a way that doesn’t damage the nutritional value, but the general U.S. avoidance of anything pungent or bitter is reflected in having bred out all of the ‘unattractive’ nutrients from our food strains. A good litmus test for this is to check for dandelion greens on the shelves; if present, the market likely sells a broad spectrum of produce that isn’t simply designed to be a sugar bomb; if absent, I’d be shocked if you found anything nutrient-dense at all.
There’s also another element: the shift of women from being stay at home mums to joining the workforce.
In the past there used to be always one family member staying at home and cooking food. That is not the case anymore for many families.
I knew since the beginning how important is to eat home made meals, so I told my wife when we started our family that we would always eat home made food every day unless we were out for another reason. We all have healthy weight levels.
>According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the average waist size is 38.5 inches (98 centimeters) for women older than 20 in the United States.2 This represents an increase of roughly two inches since the 1990s, reflecting broader trends in rising rates of obesity and metabolic conditions.3 Fryar CD, Kruszon-Moran D, Gu Q, Ogden CL. Mean Body Weight, Height, Waist Circumference, and Body Mass Index Among Adults: United States, 1999-2000 Through 2015-2016. Natl Health Stat Report. 2018;(122):1-16.
https://www.health.com/average-waist-size-for-women-11796627...
Reminds me of how annoyed I am that Eddie Bower is closing, because there's very few other retailers that sell affordable medium-tall mens sizes with extra long arms. People who don't have anatomical size issues don't seem to understand how annoying it is to find clothing that doesn't fit some statistical average. I have to get lucky to find a medium that fits a bit thinner, but then usually I'm stuck if that company decides to change their product. If I need formal wear I need to find a niche company and pay niche prices. Feet larger than size 12? Sorry. Tall but not a rugby player? Sorry.
The of the only reasons I've been wearing the same pants is because I haven't found anything else that fits well
Beyond all, I think cost is a major driver. A key difference in cheaply made clothing vs more expensively made clothing is the sophistication of the tailoring. However, the interesting side effect is that cheaply made clothing sort of fits everyone badly while more expensively made clothing either fits you really well or not at all. If(!) you care about well-tailored clothing you're either lucky that one of the brands fits your body or you need to go the custom-tailoring route. Custom tailoring wasn't anything special for a long time but we sacrificed it to our desire for cheaper clothing (which isn't necessarily a bad thing!)
I might have missed this in the scroll format but is there any reason not to drop the qualitative size names and just use an actual dimension or two?
There is a problem with the number of dimensions. Even a t-shirt is described best in neck, chest, waist, and you could add several parameters for sleeves and also for heights. Neither consumers nor manufacturers can really handle the combinatorial explosion, so you have to boil it down to one or maybe two dimensions.
But the reason even that isn't done is mostly history and market expectations. There are clothing categories that sell in actual dimensions, and (aside from the terrible dimensional accuracy of clothing in general) it works fine. But those are all on the "men's" side, and it seems the industry believes women will not like buying based on actual numbers.
I would have said that this is covered under vanity sizing. I have the feeling some consumers might be more inclined to buy a product if it has size M instead of XXL, even if the product is exactly the same. So my take is that, in the name of profit, companies lie about size.
Sizing accuracy would definitely be an improvement, but it would shine a spotlight on the core issue that clothing manufacturers are hiding from consumers: they only produce hourglass shaped clothing and ignore the vast majority of body types altogether. If everyone’s sizing was 48-38-48-15 (bust-waist-hip-crotch) rather than L/XL/2XL, at least it would be a lot simpler to write a search engine for it — but there has, in the past century’s history, been extreme hostility from U.S. women in finding that their bodies are changing shape as they age, and so retailers are forced to choose between a sharp drop in profits by telling the truth, or making it difficult to cross-shop between different retailers. As no regulations exist around this, they appear to uniformly choose the latter.
Yeah it's weird that mens pants and womens bras have numerical sizing but other womens clothing doesn't.
A lot of women's clothing does have numerical sizing, depending on where you are in the world. The number still has no connection to any physical attribute of a woman and is totally arbitrary.
They can lie with those too: https://www.reddit.com/r/fatlogic/comments/8srelb/info_graph...
People change, not just since the 90s. Just look an old movie, like Dirty Harry, or look pictures from athletes in the 70s, 80s. It does not so much plays a role, as long you try in a store. But online it sucks very much right now. Recently I ordered a pair of pants, and it was something like 3 sizes smaller, than the same model in another color. I'm not sure, if online stores and factorys think people would not return the item and just order a size larger or smaller again. I think thats also a point where the EU should push, a true size with cm.
It is genuinely incredible how well-fitting clothing is only generally available to some one-third of women who fit well into the anticipated height-waist ratio. Petite options exist in some places, but god forbid you're tall - your choices will be limited to "too short" and "too short and also too wide" if you try to go for a size up.
Skewing that further is the single length ratio of inseam to torso that a retailer's clothing is fit for. If you have short(er) legs and long(er) torso (than the median), you're doubly screwed, both in tops and bottoms; pants will flop past your feet and shirts won't reach your waist. The world is gradually starting to figure this out, but you typically only find 'tunic' (with its higher length-to-waist ratio) in a very few retailers at all.
The same goes for shoes and if you're dedicated to minimalist shoes you're basically doomed to men's shoes. Shoe size for women is a joke and seeing that most apparel and shoes are made in Asia, the divergence to standard measurements or sizes is doubly apparent.
Doesn’t help that high quality European made shoes are made either in Portugal, Spain or Italy, where women have also small feet.
I believe there are still quite some shoe factories in Germany and Eastern Europe, but are mostly dedicated to Hiking and Mountanieering shoes
If we can have mass produced fast fashion from runway to store in weeks...
Why not tailored clothing at scale? Have a set of portable body measurements that can be sent to any retailer - make an order and have it sent from factory to door in a week or two.
Or get a size that is close enough - bring it to your neighborhood tailor. Most alterations are simple and not very expensive.
Unfortunately sizing is just a leaky abstraction. You are trying to distill many variables into a single dimension. It will never be particularly great.
If sizes were updated to, say, 14Z, where Z is a common industry-wide body shape code, then it would be vastly simpler to find clothing that fits — and people who were a 22 before might now be a 16S, once the clothes are proportioned properly for their non-hourglass body.
The problem underlying this is that retailers do not want to advertise for more than one body shape, because that not only reduces their total profit (9x the models hired, 9x the designs to create, more complicated size ranges than simply blowing up a size 6 design with a photocopier), it also would force everyone in the industry to be revealed all at once as cheaping out on design and production, once the use of H for hourglass spread (since anyone who isn’t using a letter code is obviously Hourglass Only, based on the data). Corporations have multiple strong financial incentives not to do this, and their shareholders would revolt and fire any CEO who tried to reduced profits by incurring massive increases in design cost, product variants, model staffing, and retail/online logistics for the sake of “unattractive” non-hourglass women.
I think the EU’s “no more shredding clothes” initiative is going to have some very interesting ramifications over the next few years, as clothing manufacturers will have to choose between seeing people buy their unsold inventory at the local equivalent to Goodwill here in the U.S., or have to start selling clothing “made to order” with only a limited quantity kept in the store for try-on purposes. Apple, weirdly, already has a perfect logistics pipeline for exactly this approach; you can get an off-the-shelf option in stores, or you can customize it in eight to ten different ways and get something labeled “CTO” — Custom To Order. But that’s not a cheap logistics pipeline for a company that only has to set the copier inflation percentage based on your size choice today — the designs are for size 6 and then they blow it up by 140% for size 10 or whatever (yes, seriously, for real). So it may end up that once the clothing industry has to start making clothing on-demand, they will quickly expand into more options than the “print a ream of t-shirts and try to sell them in 3 months” profit-maxing approach that they’ve all coalesced into today.
> have to start selling clothing “made to order” with only a limited quantity kept in the store for try-on purposes.
This is already pretty much the case. The larger retailers have been very happy to push all "tricky" sizes to the internet, and just stock a larger variety of items in a size or three in the store instead. They'd rather stock 15 items in 3 sizes each than 5 items in 9 sizes each.
If you're not the same size as the median high-volume in-person shopaholic, physical stores these days are closer to a catalog to browse through combined with a post office for pickup.
Combine that with today's fast fashion, and I wouldn't be surprised if some sizes are only being manufactured in the dozens or low-hundreds quantities!
I believe that they're still issuing 'complete production run orders' behind the scenes, and only selling the items on the website once they arrive at the logistics warehouse — in the cases where they haven't made the item yet, they indicate 'preorder' or 'ships in X months', because cargo ships are slow and they're neither paying for air freight nor producing garments domestically. Otherwise you'd see every retailer taking days-to-weeks to initiate a shipment after the order is placed — either it would have been marked 'preorder' (or 'out of stock' after overselling it) because you're being committed an item from a general pool that hasn't been produced yet, or it's from in-stock inventory with JIT replenishment, or MTO/CTO and a production-line allocation is taken aside for your order before it reaches the general pool.
I can't wait for a world where order production, inventory, shipping, and returns are all connected by electric cargo drones that fly containers back and forth using solar power — but this also highlights a critical weakness of 'globalization': when your production, retail, shipping, and returns are all colocated within the same small region, you can do JIT or MTO/CTO with a vastly simpler logistics chain. It's why Walmart sells local farmers' eggs at their stores: eggs are an incredibly annoying food to put through a logistics chain, so if you're JIT replenishment like Walmart is, you want to replenish from the closest possible source of eggs — and that's why In'n'out Burger is only in certain areas of the U.S., too, directly corresponding to whether they can get beef at their target price including transportation costs. American Apparel understood this and did relatively well on it for quite some time, until they collapsed for (checks notes) opening hundreds of retail stores using debt and filing for bankruptcy. Don't count your chickens until the eggs have hatched, indeed.
There is an unmet market niche for tailoring with the 'construct the garment from measurements' stage automated, but critically not the human in the loop during initial measurement, construction, updating one's measurements, and so forth. It was critically important when I was having a corset made to ensure that the folks making the corset took my ribcage angle into account, and they didn't have a 'standard' measurement for that, but they were able to ensure that the construction team had it accounted for. That corset cost four digits because a team of humans spent two months sewing it, and for a corset, that's not something you can currently license or build automated production for. It's a 100% CTO garment sold by a 100% CTO shop, because you cannot non-custom a perfectly-fit corset — and an imperfect fit is fine for occasional use for people in the relevant medians, but most people buying a corset are not in those medians. So, tying this back to the main point, if that shop had offered a service for "we'll also make you some shirts", I would have bought them by the truckload because they would be, bar none, the best-fitting shirts I've ever worn. They didn't, because their production capacity was both hyperspecialized and limited, which is fine. But considering mechanical automation lines versus where to use human beings for their competences, I think one hour per few years of labor paid to someone to measure me and make sure they get it right, plus the cost of the machine-production time for the garments, would be world-changing.
Even if the garments are machine-printed and machine-cut and then machine-assisted sewn by humans, building out the CTO logistics backend of Apple's computer ordering processes, combined with an in-person competent human tailor to translate "my concerns" into "less stretch, more structure" and a production team to translate "more structure" into "use a more complex dart structure and use the -5% stretch fabric"? It wouldn't be hand-sewn, but it would fit, and that would devastate a great deal of business that today is grudgingly conceded to hourglass-exclusive retailers where no alternative yet exists.
This exists, https://www.sonofatailor.com/ for example. You put in a full set of your measurements, pick a type of garment, and they make it to fit and ship it, takes a couple of weeks or so.
It is more expensive, but not impossibly so, and they fairly aggressively discount for larger orders which presumably amortizes some of the overheads.
> bring it to your neighborhood tailor. Most alterations are simple and not very expensive.
I think, this is a misconception, some "simple" things like resizing a shirt, when done properly, might require multiple hours + a decent amount of skills and the alterations might be cheap because they are performed by underpaid workers. Nonetheless, I like the idea of supporting local tailors and I'd be in for paying premium for a local premium product.
That article mentions that custom tailoring can often cost more than the article itself.
We do. For men it's brands like Proper Cloth and for women it's Eshakti or creators on Etsy
Bad news about Eshakti, the company shut down and didn’t deliver many outstanding orders.
I as a small male struggled a lot when I started exploring fashion. Nothing seemed fitting to my body. You know what happened? I just gave up at some point. I rarely buy new clothes now. I absolutely don’t buy anything before I try them on.
You should have never bought anything before trying it on in the first place.
I myself have a very standard body shape, to the point that almost always fit perfectly in all clothes. Nevertheless I always try them on, there’s never guaranteed that they will look nice on me.
Haha. Yes, I learned that hard way. Anyway there are not many options for me to try offline. Many shops have been making extra small size only available online, which sucks.
I just want to say that this is one of the best pieces of data journalism that I have ever seen.
I never check pudding.cool for some reason, but I always smash the link when I see one
I buy shirts with a collar and length size. Surely it can’t be that hard to do the same with waist size?
Wait, I buy my pants with a waist and length size. So the problem is already solved?
Im interested to understand what is the reasoning for using the median and not average. I'm assuming the population is likely a perfect bell curve (more or less) in which case median would represent a higher waist size than using the average. This would seem to invalidate much of the presented thesis. I appreciate the detailed analysis of body shape, I think it is quite interesting.
Not sure how we expect this to be fixed when women still don't get proper pockets.
I love sites like this
Very cool visualization, worked great on firefox mobile too which isn't always the case with these types of things.
the real insight here isn't that sizing is broken. Everyone knows that. It's that fixing it would require brands to admit their current customers don't match the label they've been selling them. "You're not a size 6, but size 10" is bad for business
Please make one on US measurements and metric.
Makes me want to learn to sew to make my own clothes. I've wanted to for a while because seams on clothes always bothered me. (Not for taste or fashion, but just because I feel like the technology to make a seamless clothing product must exist.)
Very few fabrics can be fused together to make seams disappear, mostly your synthetics. Though technically wools could be felted together, but that would probably be extremely labor intensive.
I've had some athletic wear with "seamless" features, but after sometime the adhesive lets go. Fixing that at home is much more difficult than needle/thread fixes for normal stitches. To be honest, I never even realized it was "seamless" until the adhesive failed. It had no factor in my purchasing.
why is it that fabrics can be made in a square shape but not e.g. a capless cylinder shape? I can knit clothes seamlessly, right?
> why is it that fabrics can be made in a square shape but not e.g. a capless cylinder shape?
Woven fabrics are naturally rectangular because they're made of a 2D grid of fibers at 90° angles to each other. The easiest (cheapest) way to make an irregular shape out of a woven fabric is to make a rectangle and cut it down.
> I can knit clothes seamlessly, right?
Knit garments usually have some amount of seaming, but yes, you have a lot of options to make irregular shapes when knitting.
However, knitting machines tend be most efficient and making rectangular fabric. They can do some amount of shaping, but the labor and cost goes up.
If you want to hand knit a garment, you can make quite complex irregular shapes with very little or no need for seaming. However, you're talking about two orders of magnitude more labor to make a garment. Few people want to pay $1,000 for a hand-knit sweater, so you're mostly limited to knitting it yourself or having a friend or loved one who likes you.
You can manage a seamless clothing product if you are willing to have it knit on-demand for you, either by machine or by person. If you start with how [1] socks are made, then consider how to decompose your clothes into sock-shapes, you'll find:
Shirts: one tube sock for the torso, two tube socks for the arms, zero ends closed; Pants: two tube socks for the legs, one tube sock for the torso, zero ends closed; Gloves: five tube socks for the appendages, one tube sock for the palm, zero-to-five ends closed depending on fingerless style; Socks: one tube sock with one end closed; Hats: one tube sock with one end closed.
So it's entirely possible to construct a sock weaving pattern that ends up weaving a head-to-toe single garment for you out of some kind of stretchy yarn, that you would then have to figure out how to clamber into through the face hole (since that's the only open-ended sock) — but that coverall (literally!) pattern would have to be constructed for your complete set of measurements [2] in every regard, and that's an exceedingly costly amount of labor (measurement, knitting, measurement, unraveling, repeat). You can scale down that cost for seamless tops or bottoms somewhat, which you'll absolutely see high-fashion retailers do, but at the end of the day it's the cost of bespoke-tailored clothing from scratch plus the cost of bespoke-knit fabric from scratch plus the cost of not getting it exactly right the first time. None of this is intended to criticize your desire — I hate awful seams and I have collected clothing that has seams that don't bother me and/or are extravagantly seams because the sweater was intentionally panel-knit inside-out! — but I wanted to offer a bit of depth into why it's difficult to find seamless. You have to start and end the knit somewhere, and that's exponentially simpler if you start and end the knit more than once; thus, seams.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/shorts/_7Limzg3O60 or https://blog.tincanknits.com/2013/10/03/socks/
[2] https://cwandt.com/products/personal-body-unit-index makes the point nicely enough, though I believe you need Even More And Different measurements for tailoring [3] that were out of scope for this particular creation:
> Che-Wei’s Mom often does this weird finger walking dance along the edges of furniture, fabric or random stuff. She knows that the span of her hand from thumb to pinky measures 18cm. So she can quickly size things up. We always thought this was funny, until we realized it was GENIUS and started to copy her. We made Personal Body Unit Index so we can be more like Che-Wei’s Mom.
[3] Men's tailoring measurements are generally optimized for a couple dozen taken at most; further variability gets handled through 'adjustments' or 'on the fly' rather than formally at the construction stage. I think I can identify a couple dozen measurements just on my torso alone — just the bust is an entire three-dimensional construct that has to be measured over, across, under, rise, attachment shape, attachment height and width, volume, not to mention desired support/lift/shaping, and that's before we even get to the usual waist-hips-butt conglomerate, torso/arm length, shoulder width, upper/lower arm width that men are familiar with, and the perhaps less-familiar belly shape/distribution (it isn't always above-the-belt as is typical for men) and front abdomen curve shape (often without a certain male sexual characteristic, often with varying fat pattern distributions, see also belly).
> Cultural narratives around vanity sizing often square the blame on female shoppers, not brands. Newsweek once called it “self-delusion on a mass scale” because women were more likely to buy items that were labeled as sizes smaller than reality. But there’s more to the story.
> Vanity sizing provides a powerful marketing strategy for brands. Companies found that whenever women needed a size larger than expected, they were less likely to follow through on their purchases. Some could even develop negative associations with the brand and never shop there again. But when manufacturers manipulated sizing labels, leading to a more positive customer experience, brands could maintain a slight competitive edge.
How one can seriously write the same thing twice in form of contradiction and make different conclusion?
Well, the first description puts it as "self delusion", while the other describes it as a rather natural reaction and puts the initiative for the change on the brands.
What's also annoying is that sizes of the same clothes change. I have a pair of jeans that I ordered on Amazon in 2020. It happens to fit me great. So recently I decided to order two more of the same. I got exactly the same model with the same size on Amazon, just with different colors. But neither fit very well, they were far wider. The first one had such a horrible fit that I immediately sent it back. The other I can wear, but it's quite different from the other perfectly fitting one. Why are they doing that? It's insane.
The well is pemanently poisoned by marketing, this is not an engineering exercise
Here's an article from 2002 talking about how we could just have data-based sizing:
https://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/15/magazine/the-year-in-idea...
So these sizes (kid, teen, adult) are kind of ridiculous on their own, and combined with the different international systems even more. If you look at the tongue of a pair of a pair of sneakers for example, sometimes there will be four different numbers for international markets.
I wish they simply measured clothing in centimeters, and all the complexity could be left behind.
DJT would slap 86% tariff on any imported good only shown sizing in centimeters so this better be inches :)
>I wish they simply measured clothing in centimeters, and all the complexity could be left behind.
Funny you should mention shoes, because this is exactly what european shoe sizes are. It's really just a case of, yet again, Americans stick with an ass-backwards system (inches/pounds/feet, fahrenheit, etc.) when the rest of the world has settled on something much more logical and reasonable.
I need to say this out loud: Can you really imagine a similar article being written about men's clothing sizes? Seriously, get in shape. Lose weight. I don't care if it takes drugs (ozempic, whatever). If women in other highly developed countries can have a median body weight much less than American women, then I am not very symapthetic to their "clothing size crisis".
Great visualizations but you can't buy a shoe without knowing that a 10 in one brand is not a 10 in a second brand or that for example you need to size down when ordering Dr. Martens then there is no way to expect clothing to be more accurate than a shoe.
Sure, not every shoe brand is equal, but if I know I'm a 9, I can generally start there and find a shoe plus/minus a half size. I have yet to go into a store and wind up in a shoe that is 3 sizes larger than what I thought my size was. Or 3 sizes smaller. Or a size 8 in one shoe from a brand and a 10 different shoe. I can order Nike/Jordan brand shoes without trying them on and they fit. Have done it for years.
I went to re-buy the "same" jeans ~8 months after my initial purchase and the size I was wearing didn't fit in the new jeans. Tried another pair with a different wash and was back to the original size. I have tried on jeans from the same brand with similar cuts and came away two sizes apart. I can swing several sizes as a starting point between some stores. I get it, not every jean is going to be identical, but it isn't a ridiculous ask to be able to have a size I can start at and be within a size of what I need.
Anecdotally, I discovered recently that I’m a full three sizes down in Vivobarefoot shoes versus normal shoes — but for a really interesting reason. It turns out that modern runner’s shoes actually are often shaped like a foot, rather than like a spatula, and so now that I don’t have to size up for my toebox width thanks to them creating shoes that are foot shaped in disregard to fashionable propriety, I now fit much better into a 3-sizes smaller shoe than I did into their older shoes at my prior size.
Part of why retailers are afraid to change sizing is that lots of women install their clothing into their ego and brag about it socially. I don’t approve, but I recognize the extrinsic cultural circumstances* that pressure them to do so. It’s a a lot harder to brag about being a size 49-42-48–8-30 than it is to brag about being a 20UK. (The /22 in 20/22 UK, the common size these days, is silent, because size lying is normalized.)
It would make more sense instead for them to choose an anchor measurement and a body type modifier; but that gets into the problems of having to annotate nine different body type letters onto a numeric size, not to mention having to design clothing that looks good on nine different body types, and having to hire models of nine different body types. The modeling industry is unprepared to staff that need, too!
* The phrase “pinup-hourglass male-gaze body-shape imposed-ideal” serves as an excellent starting point for research on that nightmare. For those unfamiliar, ask your friends who are women about that exact phrase, and remember to listen rather than critique their potentially-lengthy reply. I’m focusing on the sizing discussion and leave that topic as an exercise for the reader.
Why bother with a rational, descriptive, functional system when you can use vaguely aggressive and hostile terms that subtly impugn the buyer and allow incredibly deceptive and manipulative marketing?
And hey, they don't really need pockets, anyway, right?
edit: Really should have used the /s, I guess - women's clothing has some appalling aspects to it, one of which is notoriously tiny pockets, which is a source of frustration for many women. For some, it even comes as a shock when they find out men can do things like put phones in their pockets.
The emotional manipulation surrounding many women's products is a different beast entirely from what men experience, generally.
And despite all of that, women keep buying those products.
I have difficulties believing that your observations are a real issue. If they were, rest assured the free market would have found out about it and would have offered the right product for those women.
Reality is that most women buy based on looks and not practicality. I really had not heard before your comment any women complaining about small pockets.
> Reality is that most women buy based on looks and not practicality. I really had not heard before your comment any women complaining about small pockets.
I've had the exact opposite experience. I've heard this complaint many, many times, and for good reason because it really is laughable.
> Reality is that most women buy based on looks and not practicality.
Well, it's a tradeoff, isn't it? As a man, I also wear a (fake) leather jacket that has some fake pockets and I complain about them, because they're dumb and unnecessary. Still like the look of it, which is why I bought it, because it's not a -huge- issue.
To put it another way, why couldn't you have both? Why not have good-looking clothes that also have proper pockets? That's the really ridiculous part about it.
Also, there's a third variable you didn't factor in at all: Comfort. It's not enough to produce clothes that look good, they need to fit as well...which is exactly what the article is about.
So now you need to find clothes that are at least mostly comfortable, look at least okay to you and have proper pockets. And that is the point where you're really going to have a hard time in women's clothing and that's why a lot of the time, women will take the more comfortable, better-looking option. 2 out of 3 at least. But the fact remains that the pockets are completely idiotic.
I think the only error here was in thinking that’s a sarcastic explanation. Look up the history of the word ‘negging’ and consider the male-dominant business and marketing industries over the past few decades. Your sarcasm is, no joke, a valid explanation for what’s happening. I can’t assess whether it’s the most likely or how much impact it has, but you’re completely right to call it out as a possible motivation, and if you simply put quote marks around it, that would be plausible rather than sarcastic. Especially given that pockets were taken away from women’s clothing over their objections for similarly disgusting reasons. Here’s highlight from the below article from 10.2979/vic.2010.52.4.561 (2010) as an upsetting example:
> Victorian women were told that they “had four external bulges already — two breasts and two hips — and a money pocket inside their dress would make an ungainly fifth.”
https://fashionmagazine.com/style/womens-pockets/ (which cites that among many others) is a good survey of the historical and current pockets issues for those not yet familiar.
I've always been struck by how outrageously exploitative and anti-consumer the textile industry is in so many ways, and how people just normalize it and don't even discuss it.
Not just in sizing, which is also a problem — my polo shirt and dress shirt sizes vary between M and XXL depending on the brand, and even my shoe size can vary up to 3 numbers, it shouldn't be rocket science to establish some quantitative standards.
There's also the issue of buying a polo shirt and having it bleed because they've decided to save a few cents on the color-blocking product, and in the first wash, it ruins not only the shirt itself but the entire laundry load.
And the fact that a cotton garment may or may not shrink, and it's a complete lottery how much it will shrink, so sometimes even trying it on in person is useless.
And then there's the fact that someone up there decides that this year a certain trend is "coming" (let's say, pants with buttons instead of zippers) and that's all they sell. If you like zippers and you need to buy pants that year, tough luck.
And all of this is compounded by the fact that even buying expensive doesn't guarantee you'll get spared from all this nonsense... I'm not a cheapskate at all, I don't mind paying if I know a garment will be reliable and durable, but sometimes you buy a designer item and the quality is absolute garbage.
All of this, by the way, is much worse in Europe than in the US (I'm not entirely sure why. Maybe it's because in the US you always use a dryer, so they have no choice but to make clothes a bit more robust for that market).
If other industries did these things, consumers would be up in arms. If any other product seemed to behave well when you superficially check it on the store, but then completely failed on very first use (like a shirt that shrinks or bleeds), you would return it. But in clothing all of this is normalized.
It also amuses me when people complain about the carbon footprint of AI: if they saw the footprint of the textile industry (compared to the actual usefulness of clothes designed to last for one season and be replaced...).
I wash new clothes by themselves for the first time for this reason, it's a good enough solution.
I once had jeans with buttons and first I thought it was terrible, but after 2-3 uses I got used to it, so it's not a big deal I guess.
And about quality there is a youtube channel where they cut shoes in half and rate the quality of the build, and based on the couple of shoes I've checked out, the price and brand rarely correlates with good quality.
As with everything else, when buying expensive longterm items (like a leather boot), it is worth doing some research into which option is the best.
Forget oil rig units. Clothes sizing is the true cursed unit system.
Did you learn about them from this video? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sdWEGzWFcCc this the only thing that seems to match oil rig units + cursed.
You're not supposed to talk about this. Someone I used to know was fired from the New York Times for saying too much about it.[1][2]
[1] https://fashionschooldaily.com/cintra-wilson-vs-jc-penney-th...
Capitalism at work. As a male and full time woman’s wear person who has been married to a woman for 17 years I’ve experienced these truths from both sides. It’s funny how rectangle and inverted triangle body shapes are oft ignored as this would open up the market for clothes to be genderless.
What a beautifully made website.
The lede is sort of in there, but buried - or at least not talked about from an economic perspective:
Right now, women consumers put up with one-ish body type (although fit model shapes vary by brand) - manufacturers thus make up to ten sizes or so of any given garment. Google fashion industry waste if you want to learn some depressing things, but - because of fashion lead times, production methods, etc, a lot of these clothes will not get sold. So there’s production waste.
There are roughly 10 core body types according to this website. So, to make ‘properly’ shaped garments for a much larger group of women is going to take roughly 120 different garments for a single design.
This just isn’t going to work for manufacturers given current production methods. I’m working on a fun sweater company right now, and it’s a very analog process - with humans and production and yarn all in different countries - ending in a single garment for analysis that is then put on a model for photography. I cannot imagine trying to scale it to 100 different shape/size combos.
Upshot - right now: choose from the following:
1) create mild differentiation and hit a product target that blends looking good on the site/shelf/model with one that looks good on the customer; keep 90% of the market
2) lean in hard on one of the “10”-ish body types - give up the rest of the market, but have happy customers
3) Try to sell stuff that can get auto-sized properly via algorithm and delivered “on-demand”
Most big companies are big, and therefore chose 1. Some smaller companies chose 2. In the happy circumstance that they chose 2 for conventionally attractive bodies, you’ve heard of them (Chanel). Some have transitioned into this space over a longer period, like Burberry. If you’re not a target customer, they may still have fans, but you might not have heard of them, e.g. Good American.
A few companies have tried 3 — direct to consumer via brick and mortar retail — (there was an MIT company deploying Shima Seki knitting on Newbury street in boston years ago), but they inevitably seem to move to a fast deployment D2C shipping model.
I think this is likely because if you go into a boutique you do not want to pay $600 for a garment and then have to wait three hours for it to get made. Online this feels more palatable.
So, we’ll probably see some continued innovation on the robot-knitting side of the world over the next ten years. In the meantime, companies mostly do what makes economic sense. And, it’s worth noting, operating the “automated” knitting machines and designing for them is no joke, it’s hard — really hard, and the software can be abysmal. So, this is an industry that’s a long way from rapid change, at least right now.
Men's clothes have gone through the same process over the course of my lifetime. For instance, I wear the same brand and size of jeans that I did in college. The waist size back then was broadly accurate to the actual size in inches, but today, thirty years on, I weigh ~20lbs more, and that waist "measurement" has up-sized along with me. I guess it's meant to flatter me, but is it really fooling anyone? I guess, based on other's comments in this thread, that it does, and vanity sizing works, which is just sad.
(Then there are men's "relaxed" fits, which bear even less relationship to actual measurements. Maybe "slim" sizing is closer to the old system? Even when they fit my waist - like, six nominal inches bigger than standard! I'm not that much wider - they don't fit my legs, so I don't know.)
None of that's anywhere close to as ridiculous as women's sizing, but give 'em time and I'm sure it will be.
The simplest brand to buy men’s clothes for me is Levi’s: their sizes correspond exactly to the waist circumference in inches. Example: https://www.levi.com/US/en_US/jeans-by-fit-number/men/jeans/...
It’s basically the only brand where I can buy online without trying it on, and still be confident that it will fit as expected.
I have a pair of men's jeans. If I lay them flat, while buttoned, and measure the width of the cloth with a cloth measure, I get 16.5", so roughly a 33" circumference. They're a 32"x34" size pair, … so that's basically spot on.
Note that, at least AIUI, the measurement printed on the pair is the wearer's waist measurement, so we thus expect the measured circumference of the top of the jeans to be slightly wider, since men's jeans are not intended to sit at the waist.
The outer measurement will also be larger than the inner. If your waist measures precisely 32", a 32" outer-measurement waistband (sans some stretch) will be too snug.
While I don't disagree, the fabric is a few millimeters thick. I think there's more error in my measurement with a cloth measure with them laid on the bed than the inner vs. outer diameter.
My own experience with men's jeans in recent times has been that the waist size is accurate, but the fit type is critical. I won't fit into any type of "slim fit" and "regular fit" needs to be one waist size up. "Relaxed fit" or its newer cousin "athletic fit" each work for me perfectly. That has been the case for two brands of jeans, at least.
Women have it much worse but it’s the same with men’s clothes.
A “large” men’s shirt from Uniqlo is totally different from a “large” from Volcom and so on. Start making your own clothes and realize there’a a thousand dimensions to a shirt and “waistline” is barely scratching the surface.
Don’t get me started on shoes, especially if you have wide feet. Something like “wide” means totally different things. Unlike clothes, poorly fitting shoes will absolutely destroy you.
At least pants have WxL.
I’ve come to chalk up clothes sizing as a natural complexity of life.
and then you buy two different brands of pants of the same w/l and they fit completely differently /)_-)
And you buy the same brand and model of pants from the same retailer and they still fit completely differently due to variation in the product. Pretty annoying, I just want to buy my Levi's 510s every couple years and get the same thing each time.
yeah I dont buy pants without trying them on now, and usually still need to get them tailored. buying oversized shirts is fine online tho because if you get them a bit wrong in either direction its fine.
This feels almost like a made up issue - like, "we want to considered victims so lets make up something to whine about"
A few concrete issues:
(1) they complain there are no international standards - And? Why should Japan, who's average size be much smaller than the USA be required to use USA standards? Their population doesn't need to care about people outside of Japan. You could say they should relabel the clothing, all that would do is raise the price and effectively make poor people poorer.
(2) they show people "Americans" get heavier - That might be reality but maybe being reminded you're wearing extra large is a good thing? Like you really are "overweight" and that's unhealthy. You can choose to ignore that but the rest of us aren't required re-label you as something you're not
(3) They graph high-fashion like LV and show they don't have large sizes. So what? Ferrari doesn't make cheap cars. I'm not required to make product that suits you. If you don't like what I'm offering, pick some other company's products. I don't like donuts, I don't go to a donut store and demand they offer pizza. Nor do I go to jeans store and demand they carry suits.
(4) they complain about vanity sizes - why is this an issue? Try the clothing on. If it fits buy it, if not don't. That's what I do because duh!, different people and companies follow different patterns. Some fit, some don't.
If you want to fix any of these - feel free to start your own clothing brand. Clearly you believe the market isn't being served. If so, put your money where your mouth is rather than requiring others to risk theirs
Its like the pockets complaints.
Women desperately want pants with pockets, but pockets throw off the aesthetic, so they don't sell well.
Is that actually true though? Because I remember distinctly as a teen somewhere in the 00s where pockets stopped being an option. I could not and still cannot buy them in regular stores. I have to go to speciality stores or order online to get pockets. A lot of women have become resigned, but I rarely know a woman who isn't very excited about pockets for every day wear.
I also don't know a single woman who enjoyed the hunt starting in their teens for a pair of jeans that actually fit. I exclusively shop online because at least I can reference a size chart using actually real measurements. They're still lying to me but at least I have a solid chance of the clothing actually fitting.
While I don't doubt that there are women who disliked seeing the number go up on their waist size, I'm still not sure that if there was an easy sizing metric we could use, that it wouldn't get used. The example in the article was basically about a great many measurements and I could see how that would get skipped. Most people don't have tailors tape lying around, but I wonder if that international number was on everything if we'd see women like it more.
I've only managed to find one brand of jeans ever that actually fit me, and then they changed their sizing system and new ones no longer fit.
I've just stopped wearing jeans.
Japan was the example that stood out to me. (It's where UNIQLO is from.)
I'm 5'11"/180cm with US11/EU45 feet. They didn't sell boots that fit me in Japan. I got a deal on an "XL" jacket that the salesman insisted I buy, because I was the only person to have ever come into the store that it fit. (It's the only thing I've ever worn labelled "XL.")
I'm pretty much the same size as you.
I am a 4XL in China (or was, when I was there last) and a S in the US.
That blows my mind.
same problem in China, usually the biggest available shoe size is 44, it improved a bit, but it's still lottery, I usually buy 46 in Europe, I was this summer in China, bought relatively cheap shoes online knowing it will be lottery and result didn't surprised me: 46 size shoes I received were more like 44-45 47 size shoes were actually like 47
in the end I have one pair of shoes which is fairly tight and other pair which is very loose, but got used to that, easier than tight one
and I tried to read reviews where people describe how accurate are the sizes for sizes in XL, I am quite skinny and very tall so I end up with something like 3 or 4XL to get ordinary size
btw. wife got used to European sizing where she buys XS or S size and she had very bad surprise after shopping in China where she found out she is now by Chinese sizes considered more like M or L since those XS and S Chinese sizes are pretty much for small girls :-))
As a healthy sized individual I've always found buying clothes based on measurements rather than vanity sizing much more useful as well. Can't say it's enough to force the hand of an entire market... but I also can't point to what marking in only vanity sizes is providing the consumer in the first place.
> (4) they complain about vanity sizes - why is this an issue? Try the clothing on. If it fits buy it, if not don't. That's what I do because duh!, different people and companies follow different patterns. Some fit, some don't.
Many people, especially women, suffer from peer pressure. You just seem to lack the empathy to acknowledge that a lot of them really struggle because of clothing sizes, out of fear of being stigmatised.
It's cool to see pudding.cool making the front of HN regularly.
a good supplement for this is the Articles of Interest episode on plus size clothing: https://articlesofinterest.substack.com/p/plus-sizes
What a lovely website, and the torso silhouette sizing diagrams are invaluable.
I'm not the target demographic, but the main problems I have are proportions not simply waistsize. I was under the impression a size range [xs,s,m,l,xl] was supposed to adjust girth (bust, waist, hip, thigh) while leaving the vertical measurements unchanged (inseam, rise). Because nothing fits, I purchase a sizing range with the intention to keep just one and return the rest. It makes for pretty funny discussions: $500 on <clothing> WTF! Anyway I've started measuring clothing dimensions and have found that the brands I shop generally tend to adjust other dimensions in a 2:1 girth:height ratio. This means that if I want a snug waistline I'll have a tight crotch or be forced to wear pants on or below the hip. Now I like wearing pants somewhere between waist and hip. There's a band of fat/padding/sinew (?) just above the hips that makes for the sweet spot in terms of comfort and utility. I don't understand clothing that's meant to sit on the hips... so uncomfortable.
As a rule of thumb I tend to shop Asian clothing stores in the US because they tend to better fit my proportions, but lately it's become hit-or-miss, i.e uniqlo. I've also got some pretty weird proportions due to my exercise regimen.
Also you've got to love brands that don't provide actual sizes. Wtf!
Size ranges are almost always infuriating. I sample my measurements throughout the day to get an accurate range and average. This is invariably what occurs:
store sizes: x1-x2, x3-x4, x5-x6
me: x2-x3
Infuriating! Non-contiguous ranges suck!
Then there's this little unexplained morsel:
> The average woman’s waistline today is nearly 4 inches wider than it was in the mid-1990s.
Their data is drawn from the US, so I'm wondering if this is related to the obesity epidemic, or a general change in silhouette. I was under the impression that historically, humans are trending taller and skinnier.
Regulate now. You would think it actually levels the playing field for everyone.
Never got this, nor the bizarre dysfunctional pockets on womens clothes.
In wartime/rationing, the government stipulated hem size, banned turn-ups, oxford bags, specified jacket lengths, cloth weights. For working class people, clothes IMPROVED. (de-mob (de-mobilisation) suits were for some working men the best suit of clothes they had ever owned)
... nor the bizarre dysfunctional pockets on womens clothes.
That clearly has the function to sell purses and it works very well - even in this thread a commenter is writing (paraphrased): I'd rather wear something cute and use a purse... The accessory market in the U.S. is worth $ 798 billion so nobody is keen to subtract from that by sewing on functional pockets.
https://www.grandviewresearch.com/industry-analysis/fashion-...
As a short adult male (5'5" - 165cm), it's always been difficult to find pants or jeans with a 28" inseam. Surprisingly, AmazonBasics line of clothes is one of the few mass produced consumer brands that has this size. Niche alternatives like Peter Manning are expensive, so it's great Amazon does this.
I'm like 1 cm taller than you and the pain is real.
And pants are still kind of doable, but mountain bikes? My enduro rig is size XS on 27.5 rims and with manufacturers dropping 27.5ers I expect this to be the last bike that feels anywhere close to "nimble". Also RIP women riders, but that's been the case for years now.
I also have proportionally small feet (size 39 EU but wide as fuck, so I only wear expensive minimalist shoes with wide toe boxes) and small hands (RIP piano, I'm not hitting an octave ever).
In theory, the claim in pants from retailers over time was that you could "just get them hemmed" — but if your jeans shape is bootcut or flare, then the leg curves sewn into the fabric will be in the wrong places for your knees, and/or you'll end up hemming off the flare. This gets especially frustrating in women's fashion because bell bottoms are popular, and there's no way to hem them without losing the 'bell' at the 'bottom' of the leg — but retailers only produce them in specific waist-inseam pairings, and so if you want to wear nice jeans with a nice flare, you have to get very lucky in finding them (especially if you're low-rise!) if they happen to exist at all.
The issue is not the sizes, the issue is the obesity epidemic. According to CDC [1] the average woman in the US is 5'3" weighing 172lbs. That's not just overweight but rather first degree of obesity. I guess you could argue that sizes should catch up to the demands when half of your population is straight up fat but I feel like a better angle would be educating people that 1500 kcal worth of Starbucks sugar for breakfast is not healthy.
The article points out that the problem is deeper than this:
> Once I compared my personalized sloper to commercial patterns and retail garments, I had a revelation: clothes were never made to fit bodies like mine. It didn’t matter how much weight I gained or lost, whether I contorted my body or tried to buy my way into styles that “flatter” my silhouette, there was no chance that clothes would ever fit perfectly on their own.
The article has mounds of data that to speak to exactly how the clothing sizes ARE the issue. Inconsistencies within brands, across brands, shifting vanity sizes, and shapes designed to fit only 12% of women. And yet, the top comment is about obesity...
Yes, obesity is clearly an epidemic. But discounting the entire article's premise to point that out?
Thanks, any one with kids experiences this. It's so frustrating. For the same kid you could literally have 5 different sizes that are the same. So you have to keep track of sizes by brand. Trying a new brand is often an adventure. Worse of all, if you come across a sale and rush to take advantage of it. You could end up having lots of items shipped only to have to return every single one of them. It's a mess.
Despite the article highlighting only people of width as the "millions of people who are excluded from standard size ranges", sizing is also a problem in the other direction: it's practically impossible to find well-fitting clothes if you're tall and in decent shape. To your point, though, perhaps there was a time when "large" and "x-large" meant "slightly tall" and "quite tall" rather than "slightly tall plus obese" and "quite tall plus very obese".
As a dude who is 6’ 1” or thereabouts with a 32” or thereabouts waist and a 34” (or thereabouts) inseam: can confirm.
Carhartts size up a waist size to account for shrinking, and I can almost reliably find a 34/34. Finding 32/34 in other pants is a challenge. On the subject of vanity sizing, I’m 15 pounds heavier than I was 20 years ago, and I still wear a 32/34. Which is why all those measurements are qualified above.
Finding shirts that fit is a similar challenge. Fitted shirts can usually be found in 16 34-35 with an athletic cut. Letter sizes are a total crapshoot. Sometimes I’m a L, sometimes an M. If I’m an M across the gut, frequently the shoulders are far too tight.
Not that I’m complaining as such, but I do agree that the sizes encompass too little information about body shape.
I'm 6'0 34/32 and even still feel some of this; L shirts are baggy, but M shirts (and sweaters) are often too short in the length and arms, especially after a wash.
And it's not my imagination; I have a few custom made dress shirts from Maxwell's and those absolutely do feel correct in both dimensions.
A tall medium where available will typically work for me but most brands don't have it at all and those that do it's a special order so what's even the point of being in the store; I might add well have just done a blind buy online from home.
As a dude who is 6'7" with a 35" waist (34" in brands that do vanity sizing) and an inseam that can handle a 34" even if it's not quite long enough, I agree that it's tough. One of the more annoying problems is that the MT shirt size doesn't seem to exist where I shop and LT flares outwards at the bottom. At least it's pretty easy to get a shirt taken in.
I’m not affiliated with it but I recommend americantall.com They only do clothes for tall people.
(And for women who’ve made it this deep in the thread, Long Tall Sally has been pretty excellent over time.)
For work casual (and formal!), I was thrilled to discover tailored shirts. Not bespoke, but actually getting fitted in a store like Jos. Bank that handles the alterations.
The value proposition is comfort and they last a decade.
I do support addressing obesity (see my elsethreads), but duly noted that it’s not a cure-all panacea for the problems faced by women. Obesity does not address the nine different U.S. body shapes; one can be obese and rectangular, or obese and spoon, or obese and triangle. Resolving obesity is a worthy cause, but will only reduce or remove the impact of size inflation on ‘vanity’ sizing as a whole, without addressing the significant disparity of sizes between manufacturers or the near-total lack of products for the eight non-hourglass body shapes.
Yeah, I didn't want to be nasty about it, but the article saying that 37" is the median adult American woman's waist measurement is... pretty shocking. Like, I'm a 6' slightly out of shape dude and my waist fluctuates from 33-35". You'd have to be pretty large to have a feminine figure and have the narrow part be 2" wider than my widest section.
No you're not. That's the size your brands of choice advertise to you so you think that you're slimmer than you are.
For anyone else wondering. Im also a 33 or 34 in pretty much any brand, just measured my waistline (where my pants usually sit), 38.5 inches.
Never knew!
I'll point out a statistical hazard here. While CDC lists the average height and weight at 5'3" and 172 lbs, the medians appear to be 5'3" and 161 lbs. That's a BMI of 28 and is considered overweight (25-30), not obese. Although I'll mention BMI is a pretty rough measure to begin with.
To provide context for those still using BMI as the sole 'fat or not' discriminator — the CDC published an n=9894 longitudinal study* about ten years ago; generally summarizing figure 1, the median starts around 0.53 +/- gender variance at 20-29, peaks at 0.62 +/- at 70-79, and then begins decreasing from there; however, they found that BMI fails to represent the 'fat' levels improperly (to our detriment) for people in their 40s (figure 2), as older human bodies tend to lose fat in areas (i.e. arms) that have no significant bearing on overall health, but gain fat in the abdomen (which other studies have shown does correspond to increasing cardiovascular issues). They show median waist-to-height-ratio data as 'monotonically increasing abdominal adipose tissue throughout the years of adulthood but decreasing mass in non-abdominal regions', which bodes very poorly for clothing manufacturers — because not only do you have to account for nine body shapes in women, but you also have to account for age skewing the waist-to-length ratios of the body shape further.
It would be particularly interesting to repeat this sizing study using the garment length to identify where it falls in 'height' median for women, and then identifying what 'age' median the garment's waistline is calibrated for. I can certainly guess what the results will be from personal experience on a per-retailer basis, and it would be a useful way to mathematically identify 'underserved niches' in today's market to target with appropriately-fit clothing (without a body scan).
* doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0172245 (2017) https://stacks.cdc.gov/view/cdc/44820
“BMI fails to represent the 'fat' levels improperly” - what is that supposed to say. I’m just done trying to understand things that the writer didn’t even read.
*properly. Apologies, logical negation errors are and always will be my bane in self-proofreading.
I am really surprised about the sharp increase in body size by age in the USA.
I have just anecdotal experience here in Europe, but I know for a fact that all the females in my family have kept the same size since they were 16-18 years old. That’s also my experience with the male side of the family.
Most adults in the US become physically inactive after they leave school/collage and move to an area where they have to drive everywhere, while sitting in an office the rest of the day.
While I'm well aware weight gain requires over consumption, I feel there is an under appreciated importance on being somewhat mobile rather than sitting/laying down for 23 hours a day
You can live a completely sedentary lifestyle and lose or maintain weight through eating normal amounts of food. Exercise is not the problem, overeating consistently is.
For women, it's very common to consume sugary coffee flavored drinks and this behavior is glamorized on social media.
For men, the problem is worse.
In theory sure, but teenagers love sugary drinks and burgers too, sugar drinks exist all over the world too where obesity rates are significantly lower. While you can be slim while sitting all day doing nothing, being physically active is massively important for your health.
The fact that the particular area you live in determines so much of the probability a person would be obese suggests the location plays a huge part. While sugary drinks are marketed and popular everywhere.
I remember a survey of explanatory variables for obesity. The variable that explained more was the size of corn subsidies.
The hypothesis was: if you produce it, it will be consumed (Say's Law). Lower prices mean larger quantities demanded. (I know, it sounds like a confounding variable, you need a cross-sectional regression)
Yea, if you read between the lines in this article this stands out. Over half of all adult women don't fit into regular sizes. "Plus size" is not normal.
> I feel like a better angle would be educating people that 1500 kcal worth of Starbucks sugar for breakfast is not healthy.
An even better angle is educating Starbucks to stop selling unhealthy garbage.
The idea that all blame rests on individuals and corporations are blame-free is crazy. They have way more agency over what we consume than individuals do.
This is an extremely hazardous opinion.
It is true that corporations spend vast resources attempting to lure consumers into their webs but you do have agency! You can resist!
Vote with your wallet and strip these bad actors of the power you handed to them when you gave up.
> The idea that all blame rests on individuals and corporations are blame-free is crazy.
You know they have Starbucks in other countries without an obesity crisis?
No one is forcing you or I to order a particular drink at Starbucks; they literally put the number of calories directly next to the menu item. The blame is 100% on the individuals making their own health decisions.
> The blame is 100% on the individuals making their own health decisions.
If you put a pile of junk food on the floor, your pet will eat it until they make themselves sick.
We are smarter than many animals and have more discipline. But we are still animals and do not have unlimited executive function. The people who architect the environment of incentives that surround us bear some amount of responsibility for the behavior those incentives create.
Denying that is denying that we are living beings subject to all of the same limitations as any other mortal animal. We are not spherical rational actors in a vacuum.
You can't control the incentives, you can only control your reactions to those incentives.
Just eyeballing a map, the countries that pop out as both having Starbucks and not having an obesity problem are China and India. Other than that, it looks like most of the countries that have Starbucks have obesity rates over, like, 20%, which seems pretty bad.
This isn’t to say Starbucks is causing obesity, of course. Most likely they are showing up together as the economy develops.
I do think it is worth noting that obesity is a pretty widespread problem, not uniquely American or anything like that.
Yeah but progressive ideals are a much harder sell if people have to take responsibility for their actions. "Others should pay for my mobility scooter because others keeps feeding me junk food" and all that.
Then again, free will is an illusion, so...
That Starbucks probably saved my life after I made an unwise decision to bike 40 miles on an empty stomach. Bonking is real, and I’m glad they are allowed to sell the sugary beverages to prevent me from bonking.
Oh and I also fainted the first time I donated blood, because I did not know I should not donate blood while fasting. Again, sugary drinks helped.
I bonked in the middle of a 100km ride on a rail trail through farmer's fields. I thought I'd had enough food, since the same amount was sufficient for the initial trip out a few days earlier, but it wasn't. It was the return journey of my first big bike trip, and it was absolute hell after I bonked. I'd ride for twenty minutes, then lie on the ground for ten. When I was laying on the ground I'd be searching the vegetation for anything that looked vaguely edible.
Crazy how a glucose drop can sneak up and humble you so quickly!
There's a lot of area on the spectrum between where we are today and "sugary beverages are all banned".
For example, Starbucks could limit the sizes it sells and advertises—you'd still be able to have as much sugar as you would like by buying multiple drinks, but it would raise the activation energy needed to do that. Making the healthier choice the path of least resistance works wonders.
You really can't discern between a healthy portion of sugar and an unhealthy portion of sugar? I can assure you it should be way less than what they are serving. Especially since society will bare these costs in a variety of unexpected ways, Starbucks needs to be compelled into doing so. They broke the societal compact, they have to be punished.
I can discern it very well. And indeed I think for the people like me who can discern it, stores should be able to sell these sugary beverages. The same amount of sugar is unhealthy when I’m sedentary, but absolutely necessary in other cases.
That's fine but people like you are an extreme minority and I'd rather the government regulate the greed from these addiction companies rather than forcing tax payers to foot the bill.
Corporate welfare has to end.
You know multinational brands sell sweeter products in the US than in other countries?
It's not that all the rest of the world has sugar tax or something. It's customer profile.
[0]: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32576300/ [1]: https://www.itiger.com/news/1184332557
> They have way more agency over what we consume than individuals do.
I walk by Starbucks every day without consuming 1500 kcal worth of Starbucks. You think that's due to their agency??
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I'm guessing that you meant this in a semi-humorous and hyperbolic way rather than a mean way, but it would probably be good to review the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. A comment like this wouldn't need too much to come across as friendly rather than aggressive.
GLP-1s disprove this to an extent. Personal responsibility is based on a fallacy, it’s just brain chemistry.
So give everyone GLP-1s to cast the shadow of personality responsibility (reduction in adverse reward center operations, broadly speaking) through better brain chemistry. Existence is hard, we can twiddle the wetware to make it less hard.
The only thing that GLP-1 agonists prove is that CICO does indeed work - if you force yourself into a caloric deficit through the inhibition of hunger hormones using drugs that you will lose weight. It has nothing to do with people choosing to eat highly processed unhealthy foods over healthier options. When you're on Ozempic or peptides like Retatrutide/Tirzepatide you don't think "I will not eat a bag of chips today because it's unhealthy and calorie dense", you simply don't think about eating because your feeling of hunger is inhibited.
You are incorrect. GLP-1s modify food desires as well. “Will power” is merely hormone levels in this regard.
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle...
> Glucagon-like peptide-1 receptor agonists (GLP-1RAs) are increasingly used for type 2 diabetes and obesity treatment. Their effects on appetite and satiety are well established, but less is known about their associations with food purchases. Case reports and small observational studies suggest that GLP-1RA initiation is associated with altered preferences from highly processed, energy-dense products to minimally processed foods. We examined whether initiation of GLP-1RAs for treatment was associated with changes in nutritional quality and processing level of supermarket purchases.
> Changes in purchasing patterns after GLP-1RA initiation were seen across most nutrient categories. Opposed to comparisons, after the first prescription, participants purchased fewer calories, sugars, saturated fats, and carbohydrates, alongside modestly more protein. The share of ultraprocessed foods also decreased. Although modest at the individual level, these changes may accumulate at the population level, particularly given increasing GLP-1RA use.
Food desires are simply addictions like smoking. If you cease consuming high amounts of processed food and sugar (through the inhibition of hunger), then you also kill these cravings.
GLP-1 functioning as methodone is fine for me tbh. Medically assisted addiction management is pretty gold-standard for a lot of addictions!
> The only thing that GLP-1 agonists prove is that CICO does indeed work
This is incorrect, as demonstrated over and over again. For many people's bodies, consuming less will result in the body changing its metabolism to burn less, and not dipping into fat stores. Conversely, for many people's bodies, exercising more does not in fact change their metabolism and the amount of energy they burn. (There are studies that going from "zero" to "not zero" makes a meaningful difference, but "not zero" to "quite active" often doesn't.) "CICO" is not useful or actionable for many people.
That there is variance in energy expenditure both within a population and within a person over time doesn't mean that a caloric deficit doesn't work. It just means that using a single scalar value (which is usually a gross estimate) to drive your caloric intake is a poor approach.
The body has means to regulate it's energy expenditure to maintain homeostasis, and in some people it can be a hundreds of kcal difference. But if you're trying to lose body fat on a 10% estimated deficit and fail, the conclusion shouldn't be that a 20% deficit will also fail.
For some people, a 50% "deficit" fails. And the entire concept of "X workout burns Y calories" is completely bunk. Again, there have been multiple studies to this effect.
Are you actually saying some people don’t lose weight on a 50% caloric deficit? Is there any evidence of that?