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Sizing chaos

pudding.cool

61–70 of 458 posts

Re: Sizing chaos

#61
post #16

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 mu…

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.

Re: Sizing chaos

#62

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?

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.

Re: Sizing chaos

#63

"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.

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.

Re: Sizing chaos

#64

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 wit…

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.

Re: Sizing chaos

#65

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…

>"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 convenien…

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.

Re: Sizing chaos

#66
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.

Re: Sizing chaos

#67

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…

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.

Re: Sizing chaos

#68

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…

[deleted]

Re: Sizing chaos

#69

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…

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.

Re: Sizing chaos

#70
post #45

>By age 15, most girls have gone through growth spurts and puberty, and they’ve reached their adult height. >Many have started to outgrow the junior’s size section. Ummmmm.... What? I wore junior’s sizes well into my 30s. Am I really that much of an outlier?

Statistically, yes.
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