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.
Sizing chaos
241–250 of 458 posts
Re: Sizing chaos
#242Interesting 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.
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.
Re: Sizing chaos
#243So 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.
Re: Sizing chaos
#244So 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.
>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.
Re: Sizing chaos
#245So 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 :)
Re: Sizing chaos
#246Earlier quoted context omitted.
>"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…
re: consistency https://xkcd.com/927/
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.
Re: Sizing chaos
#247Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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.
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.
Re: Sizing chaos
#248The original title made clear that this was about sizing for women's clothes. I'm not sure why that was removed; it wasn't clickbaity, and made the title more informative. In fact, I'd argue that just "Sizing chaos" is more clickbaity. (The article itself doesn't seem to have an official title.)
Re: Sizing chaos
#249This 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…
> 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 th…
> 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.
Re: Sizing chaos
#250Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
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.
”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