Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 un…
Sizing chaos
201–210 of 458 posts
Re: Sizing chaos
#202Earlier quoted context omitted.
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"…
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 abov…
The value proposition is comfort and they last a decade.
Re: Sizing chaos
#203Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 abov…
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.
Re: Sizing chaos
#204Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
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.
Re: Sizing chaos
#205The 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 break…
You can be in perfect shape and still not find clothes that fit. The issue IS the sizes.
Normalize going to a tailor, instead of grumbling about how you aren't benefiting enough from the sweatshops mass retailers are running.
Re: Sizing chaos
#206Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 prof…
> 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…
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.
Re: Sizing chaos
#207Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
“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.
Re: Sizing chaos
#208Re: Sizing chaos
#209The 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 break…
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)