Sizing Saga

So over the last couple of months, I've been trying out ordering shirts and pants from these on-line Thai tailors where you send them a set of detailed measurements, they sew the item to those specs, then mail them to you. Then once the items arrive, you hope that you measured right and they tailored it correctly. Shirts have been a good experience; for some reason, off-the-rack shirts are sized with 2 parameters, collar cicumference and sleeve length. From there, everything else is supposed to follow. It should be clear why this isn't really that accurate. Plus, the smallest sleeve lengths carried in stores are usually slightly too long for me. Pants, on the other hand, are sized by both waist and length, so for the most part, off-the-rack is pretty close to the detailed measurements approach.

For a long time, I had no idea how women's' clothing was sized, although recently learned that they're done primarily by number. Just 1 number. That seemed pretty inaccurate to me, and seems to lead to a tremendous industry of immense effort trying to find designers with suitable sizing, chasing down brands and stores searching for that magic mix of appealing design and matching fit.

There were two related articles recently in the New York times on this topic which greatly amused me. The first article is a first-person story (NYT-DressingRoomHope.pdf in the stash) related the main article with such amusing choice lines as:

"Like many women, my experience shopping for pants is often an exercise in futility... after 15 minutes of yanking and zipping, I return the whole pile of ill-fitting clothing, and leave the store annoyed and empty handed."

The main article (NYT-FitLogicWomensClothing.pdf) covers a new method of sizing women's clothing with some amusing euphemisms like:

"According to Fit Technology, more than 90 percent of women over 35 fall into three body types: straight silhouette, curvy and pearlike, which the company labels 1, 2 and 3."

"The creation of vanity sizes -- intentionally smaller than an objective size, to flatter the buyer — has introduced pure guesswork into shopping. A size 10 from one clothing manufacturer is a size 8 from another and a 12 from still another."

I love "pearlike" and "vanity sizes."

On the more serious side, thre is also an interesting (although not unexpected) prisoners dilemma situation described by these two quotes:

"Then there is the reality, however counterintuitive it may be, that retailers and clothing makers thrive off sizing confusion. Consumers who find a brand that fits are likely to stick with it and a standard sizing system would encourage them to visit other stores."

"36 percent return a product every year because it does not fit. Those returns equal 12 percent of all clothing sales. As a result, industry executives say, women shop at fewer stores and buy fewer clothes than they would if sizing were more transparent."