Sizing chaos

https://pudding.cool/2026/02/womens-sizing/

by zdw • 5 months ago

827 397 5 months ago

polytely• 5 months ago

Very cool visualization, worked great on firefox mobile too which isn't always the case with these types of things.

ChadNauseam2• 5 months ago

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.)

malfist• 5 months ago

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.

dylan604• 5 months ago

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.

ChadNauseam2• 5 months ago

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?

altairprime34• 5 months ago

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).

cyberrock• 5 months ago

For t-shirts you're looking for loopwheel or tubular knit.

4gotunameagain• 5 months ago

[flagged]

i80and• 5 months ago

ah yes, clothes not fitting, a famously bourgeoisie problem /s

As somebody with an atypical body shape, not being able to find things that fit is an endless source of irritation and discomfort

shikshake• 5 months ago

I’d argue this problem is more important than most of the tech articles on this site. Having well-fitted clothing is a massive quality of life improvement.

dang2• 5 months ago

Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments and flamebait? You've unfortunately been doing it repeatedly, and we've already asked you repeatedly to stop.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45681833 (Oct 2025)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44728916 (July 2025)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44287383 (June 2025)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36346650 (June 2023)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29857405 (Jan 2022)

I don't want to ban you, but if you keep doing this, we're going to end up doing that. If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and using HN as intended, we'd appreciate it.

zeckalpha• 5 months ago

Almost like we should use, you know, units of length, when measuring lengths/widths/etc.

sien• 5 months ago

Yeah. It's a remarkable problem. There is a clear solution that is happily used for men. You tell people what to measure then have the clothes sized for the various dimensions.

Charles Tyrwhitt have this guide where they tell you what to measure for shirts :

https://www.charlestyrwhitt.com/au/size-guides/szg-formal-sh...

and for trousers :

https://www.charlestyrwhitt.com/au/szg-trousers-4-2021.html

Presumably some online shops for women have something similar?

bhk• 5 months ago

Funny enough, vanity sizing strikes there too. The purported waist size of a pair of Levi's is off by almost three inches.

One might argue that the size on their label is not supposed to indicate the size of the garment waistband, but the waist size of the wearer who would find it comfortable, but even with that interpretation it doesn't work out right.

ToucanLoucan2• 5 months ago

Can confirm the utter hell it is to shop for women's clothing. I started transitioning at the ripe old age of 36, and up until that point, have obviously bought clothes for men. My entire fucking life I have bought XL shirts and jeans with a 38-44 inch waist, shorter legs. Never had an issue.

Womens sizes... like Jesus Christ, I don't know how ANY women tolerate this shit. It's completely made up. A size 0 in one brand feels similar to a size 3 in another, feels similar to Large in another, feels similar to -1 in another. Anything you buy and like, you effectively have to pray they keep making forever, and always buy from that brand or you risk getting something else that doesn't fit correctly.

I've never shopped a product category that feels so utterly hostile to consumer comprehension, except MAYBE microtransactions in videogames. And I'm not meaning to be dramatic, that's the only other type of market I've experienced in life where it feels like my attempts to understand what I'm buying are being deliberately frustrated like this.

observationist2• 5 months ago

It's intentional, to force you to engage a salesperson, and that salesperson knows all the jargon and unnecessary variations and how to size clothing that fits you. Once you have a positive transaction like that, it gives the company the opportunity to get a very loyal customer out of you, and it's the more pricey and "exclusive" brands. 100% emotional manipulation - they piss you off on purpose so they can seem like a hero and set you up with clothing that feels and looks good, but the specific fit will only match their numbers, and maybe even only their numbers for that season. How about ensuring that you can match someone who wears XL with an L right after holiday season, or hit them with an XL in the fall to set them up for a change during the holidays, etc.

The schemes are ruthless and never end, and it's all arbitrary fashion. In some ways, it's a lot easier being a guy.

ToucanLoucan2• 5 months ago

I mean shit, I'd happily engage with salespeople if I wasn't terrified of my red-state-living self getting hatecrimed if I go to the wrong store.

nikkaelle• 5 months ago

As a trans woman who started transitioning at 43... I agree 100%.

This article mostly discusses waist size, for which I'm in the lower quartile. But after 40 years of testosterone poisoning my underbust is above the median. Finding clothing that fits and is flattering is really difficult!

akkanii• 5 months ago

Obviously it's going to be even more difficult for males to find women's clothing that fits them adequately, as they are designed with the female body in mind.

Maybe there are special clothing shops for transvestites that would provide a better fitting product?

observationist2• 5 months ago

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.

altairprime34• 5 months ago

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.

tirant10• 5 months ago

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.

NanoCoaster• 5 months ago

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.

0xbadcafebee• 5 months ago

I took stacks upon stacks of jeans with me to the dressing room, searching in vain for that one pair that fit perfectly. Over 20 years later, my hunt for the ideal pair of jeans continues. But now as an adult, I’m stuck with the countless ways that women’s apparel is not made for the average person, like me.

I'm a 5'6 145lbs adult male. Y'know how many clothes are made that fit me? T-shirts, size S, fitted; and dress shirts by Express. That's basically it. Pants don't fit me because the legs aren't short enough, the crotch isn't long enough, and I don't have a butt/thighs. Basically no jacket fits me. Shoes? One of my feet is a different size than the other.

I, too, have to try on literally every garment I see that sort-of-looks-like it might fit. I have tried hundreds of pairs of jeans, dress shirts, jackets. When I find one that fits, I buy two of them (or every one in a different color). And then I gain or lose weight... and the cycle repeats. I probably own 30 pairs of jeans, and a closet full of shirts that I almost never wear, but one day might want, and will never be able to find anywhere else.

Human bodies are diverse. Standard sizes don't work. But you know what will give you the perfect fit? Tailoring. Buy something too big, take it to a neighborhood drycleaner & tailor, and have them alter it to fit you. It's that simple. If you're worried about not having "enough" clothes and want to save money, it's not hard to use a sewing machine (if I learned, you can). In retrospect, I should've used tailoring rather than constantly hunt for fitting clothes. But I suspect I hunt the racks for the same reason women do: the idea that, somewhere out there, there's a better item I don't have.

I don't think there's a way to reform the fashion industry, as it produces what the market bears. You could also - and I know this is crazy, but bear with me - wear ill-fitting clothes. Your gender doesn't have to constantly strive to be attractive. We will be into you regardless. And if you're just trying to live up to your own gender's expectations... maybe it's not a great expectation.

altairprime34• 5 months ago

This post is about women’s sizing, not men’s sizing. I’d love to see a followup post by someone doing the same analysis for men’s sizing, though!

exmadscientist3• 5 months ago

Women's sizing got bad first, and is worse today, but men's sizing is already moving fast down the same road.

This crap affects all of us and awareness that we're all in the same boat is a good thing.

sublinear• 5 months ago

It's a similar situation for taller men (6'1" and up).

All t-shirt sizing is completely wrong for me. I have a longer torso and broader shoulders than anything in standard sizing. Some "big and tall" sizes fit my shoulders and are long enough, but then are also insanely baggy because I'm apparently not fat enough.

fishtoaster• 5 months ago

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!

pinkmuffinere• 5 months ago

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?

zamadatix3• 5 months ago

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.

apt-apt-apt-apt2• 5 months ago

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.

AmbroseBierce• 5 months ago

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.

galkk3• 5 months ago

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.

maxrev17• 5 months ago

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.

trhway• 5 months ago

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.

tirant10• 5 months ago

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…

jcims2• 5 months ago

I wonder if understanding a particular brand's sizing drives up repeat purchases.

altairprime34• 5 months ago

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'.

harrall2• 5 months ago

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.

iamacyborg• 5 months ago

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.

dredmorbius4• 5 months ago

Flipside: drastically changing a brand's sizing standards has repeatedly driven me away from long-time favourites.

This happened to me several times from the 1990s through the aughts. Literally between one shopping session and the next, the same style of clothes (tops, bottoms) which had fit perfectly no longer did, resulting both in a set of returns (of clothing) and non-returns (of myself, for future purchases) to those stores. As someone who generally dislikes the shopping experience, additional and insurmountable frictions such as these are absolutely fatal.

More recently (as I've just commented) it's the widespread adoption of stretch fabrics in non-athletic wear. I may want stretch in some of my workout clothes. I don't want it in my street clothing.

bko• 5 months ago

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.

altairprime34• 5 months ago

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.

lotsofpulp2• 5 months ago

"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.

spockz• 5 months ago

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.

dehue2• 5 months ago

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.

queenkjuul3• 5 months ago

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.

lucaslazarus• 5 months ago

re: consistency

https://xkcd.com/927/

sevenseacat7• 5 months ago

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.

dehue2• 5 months ago

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.

bubblewand6• 5 months ago

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.

altairprime34• 5 months ago

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.

TacticalCoder• 5 months ago

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".

orbisvicis8• 5 months ago

eBay? Can you elaborate? Do you mean used clothes like on Poshmark? And does eBay really publish decent clothes measurements?

adrian_b3• 5 months ago

All my life, for most kinds of clothes, like shirts or jackets, buying the standard sizes has never been a problem.

On the other hand, I have never found trousers in a standard size that I would find comfortable. I have always worn only either completely bespoke trousers or standard trousers that have been customized for me by a tailor.

Unfortunately, where I live tailors have disappeared. For now this has not been a problem, because I still have many bespoke trousers made a long time ago. I wonder what I will do when I will need new trousers.

This is not an absolute size related problem. Many years ago, I have been obese for some years. Then I have learned to control my weight (after many failures), and for the last 2 decades I have been a relatively slim male of average height.

Despite this, I was content with standard sizes neither when I was obese, nor now when I am slim.

I am wondering why a lot of professions that existed when I was a child have become non-profitable, because the existence of cheaper alternatives today still does not seem a sufficient explanation. I have grown in Eastern Europe and absolutely everybody (except those belonging to the hierarchy of the ruling party) would have been considered extremely poor by today's standards. Despite this, most people could afford bespoke clothes of very high quality compared to what is available today and the tailors who made them had decent revenues.

goodmythical2• 5 months ago

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.

coldtea• 5 months ago

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

Gigachad5• 5 months ago

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.

echelon2• 5 months ago

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:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandy_Melville

roenxi3• 5 months ago

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.

orbisvicis8• 5 months ago

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.

sevenseacat7• 5 months ago

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.

pprotas• 5 months ago

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.

troupo2• 5 months ago

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.

janalsncm2• 5 months ago

The pockets issue is even more blatant since a lot of women would like to put their phones in their front pockets.

postexitus• 5 months ago

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.

osener• 5 months ago

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.

dredmorbius4• 5 months ago

I'd noticed the near-universal adoption of stretch fabrics recently, and greatly dislike it. I hadn't considered that this is an inventory optimisation method, though that absolutely makes sense.

corford• 5 months ago

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.

tgv• 5 months ago

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.

throwaway20374• 5 months ago

    > Like, why doesn't the market solve for this?

This is a classic HN reply. The market has solved for what women want: vanity sizing that doubles as (exclusive) social signaling. If you look at the sizing charts from the article, normie brands have a huge range of sizes. The couture / elite brands are all much smaller. It makes perfect sense when trying to build a better-than-normie fashion brand. Do you really think Louis Vuitton or Prada wants women with a size 18 dress size wearing their ready-to-wear clothes? Absolutely not. But they are welcome to (and do) buy bags, shoes, scarfs, and other accessories.

tristor• 5 months ago

Revealed preference vs stated preference answers the question of why women's clothing generally lacks pockets. Women prioritize aesthetics over utility when shopping. Clothing follows trends more than most things, though, which is why this is changing as younger generations prefer more casual and functional clothing.

383toast• 5 months ago

makes a case for women being too fat and getting fatter over time

jedberg2• 5 months ago

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.

TMWNN• 5 months ago

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...>

crote4• 5 months ago

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.

dboreham• 5 months ago

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.

jedberg2• 5 months ago

I meant more the pants and dress shirts, which are sized in inches.

Markoff3• 5 months ago

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

croisillon• 5 months ago

you're right! i just try the clothes i used to wear as a toddler, it's ridiculous how much they don't fit

Waterluvian• 5 months ago

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?

carabiner• 5 months ago

They can lie with those too: https://www.reddit.com/r/fatlogic/comments/8srelb/info_graph...

jccooper• 5 months ago

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.

altairprime34• 5 months ago

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.

ipsum2• 5 months ago

Yeah it's weird that mens pants and womens bras have numerical sizing but other womens clothing doesn't.

sevenseacat7• 5 months ago

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.

vander_elst2• 5 months ago

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.

socalgal2• 5 months ago

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

zamadatix3• 5 months ago

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.

9dev• 5 months ago

(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.

WarmWash2• 5 months ago

Its like the pockets complaints.

Women desperately want pants with pockets, but pockets throw off the aesthetic, so they don't sell well.

iteria• 5 months ago

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.

starkparker• 5 months ago

There's a Pudding piece on that, too: https://pudding.cool/2018/08/pockets/

bsimpson• 5 months ago

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.")

exmadscientist3• 5 months ago

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.

Markoff3• 5 months ago

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 :-))

Rendello5• 5 months ago

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.

altairprime34• 5 months ago

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).

flumpcakes2• 5 months ago

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.

tirant10• 5 months ago

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.

itake• 5 months ago

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.

imagetic• 5 months ago

It's cool to see pudding.cool making the front of HN regularly.

uberman• 5 months ago

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.

mcgrath_sh• 5 months ago

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.

altairprime34• 5 months ago

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.

monsharen3• 5 months ago

I've collected size charts for every shoe model across 200 brands and found that it's not uncommon for any given size to vary +-1.5 sizes (a range of 3 sizes total). And that's size charts from manufacturers.

Many online stores use outdated or outright wrong sizes charts. One of Europe's largest online retailers don't even bother providing official manufacturer size charts at all. They have one generic size chart for almost all of the shoes, so it's pretty much down to the consumer to return and retry. Kind of crazy state of things.

astura• 5 months ago

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?

flumpcakes2• 5 months ago

Statistically, yes.

sevenseacat7• 5 months ago

As someone who grew out of junior sizes by the age of 10, yes (so am I)

miav• 5 months ago

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.

altairprime34• 5 months ago

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.

frm882• 5 months ago

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.

tirant10• 5 months ago

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

ggm• 5 months ago

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)

frm882• 5 months ago

... 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-...

Animats• 5 months ago

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...

[2] https://archive.is/md8qw

magneticnorth2• 5 months ago

"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.

steanne• 5 months ago

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.

magneticnorth2• 5 months ago

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.

Legend24402• 5 months ago

Mostly though it's the obesity increase.

40% of Americans are obese, and 75% are overweight. 30 years ago only 20% were obese.

tirant10• 5 months ago

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.

altairprime34• 5 months ago

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.

selfmodruntime2• 5 months ago

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.

brianleb• 5 months ago

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.

tirant10• 5 months ago

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.

NewsaHackO• 5 months ago

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.

AlienRobot• 5 months ago

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...

Galaco• 5 months ago

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)

crote4• 5 months ago

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.

Maxion4• 5 months ago

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.

Anamon• 5 months ago

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)

I (Swiss) once ordered a T-shirt from a U.S. brand, size M because that fits me perfectly 95% of the time. It was way too big for me.

Lesson learned, the next time I liked a T-shirt form the same brand, I ordered the size S. It was way too tight, I couldn't even put it on. I checked the label, and it said: "European fit".

oasisbob• 5 months ago

many retailers had no measurements for their own clothes except the reference size.

When you say reference size, do you mean like a single size which is used in the industry for samples? I had a friend living in Montreal who was fashionable, she said it was like heaven being a size 8 in Montreal because she had access to a bunch of cheap, interesting, one-off samples. Wondering if this is the same concept.

Never been in the industry, but used to follow a blog of someone who did pattern design for a north-american casual-wear company, super interesting stuff! There's lots of nuance in size grading.

choilive• 5 months ago

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.

CGMthrowaway• 5 months ago

We do. For men it's brands like Proper Cloth and for women it's Eshakti or creators on Etsy

gbear605• 5 months ago

Bad news about Eshakti, the company shut down and didn’t deliver many outstanding orders.

altairprime34• 5 months ago

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.

crote4• 5 months ago

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!

bigiain• 5 months ago

That article mentions that custom tailoring can often cost more than the article itself.

vander_elst2• 5 months ago

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.

pimterry• 5 months ago

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.

dredmorbius4• 5 months ago

This has been a long-unfulfilled promise of technology for literally decades.

I remember multiple iterations of various made-to-measure clothing initiatives, dating to at least the 1990s. Levi Straus offered this in its San Francisco Union Square flagship at one point, as did other clothing producers. One of the few extant references I can find is a 16 year old Tripadvisor question with answers indicating that the option existed many years earlier than that: <https://www.tripadvisor.com/ShowTopic-g60713-i30-k3392413-Ma...>

More recently, in the late aughts / early teens, there was something of a flood of made-to-measure selvage jeans merchants, though I believe these have also largely ceased to operate. When I checked in on them, prices were far higher than off-the-rack options, not by percentages but by multiples, as in 3--5 times as expensive. I suspect that these to remained niche.

The broader lesson is probably that mass-produced, mediocre-fitting clothes simply offer vastly greater economies of scale that no element of automation or technology can overcome.

For men (speaking from experience) and likely women having tailored clothing made in a lower-wage region (Hong Kong, India, and Thailand seem to be the usual suspects) may remain an option. Or the self-provisioning option via a sewing machine, as noted in TFA.

Closer to HN's interests: similar failures of promises for individually-tailored technologically-mediated options to emerge, unless those serve the interests of advertisers or other mass manipulators seems to be a profoundly persistent tendency. In light of present trends (AI / LLM) I'm calibrating expectations accordingly.

dredmorbius4• 5 months ago

Update: Levi Strauss apparently does still offer bespoke jeans, under the "Lot No. 1" label. Pricing begins around $USD500, and the option is offered only in SF, NY, and London.

There is also a "Levi's Taylor Shop" option at somewhat more locations: <https://www.levi.com/US/en_US/features/tailor-shop>.

eszed• 5 months ago

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.

kccqzy3• 5 months ago

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.

deathanatos2• 5 months ago

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.

bubblewand6• 5 months ago

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.

flyinghamster• 5 months ago

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.

mgaunard• 5 months ago

Sizing only sucks because diet and exercise habits changed since the sizes were introduced.

Legend24402• 5 months ago

But then why haven't the sizes been updated? We've been gaining weight slowly over decades, they've had time.

munificent6• 5 months ago

We're all still collectively telling ourselves we'll get back in shape any day now.

diath• 5 months ago

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.

[1] https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/body-measurements.htm

munificent6• 5 months ago

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.

kccqzy3• 5 months ago

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.

oceanplexian• 5 months ago

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.

c22• 5 months ago

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.

raincole• 5 months ago

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

albedoa• 5 months ago

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??

altairprime34• 5 months ago

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.

zetanor• 5 months ago

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".

mauvehaus• 5 months ago

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.

selfmodruntime2• 5 months ago

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.

Insanity• 5 months ago

Yeah I wanted to point out the same. This sizing problem is not as prevalent outside of the US/Mexico (leaders in obesity).

It’s less prevalent in EU and even less so in some East Asian countries.

panic2• 5 months ago

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.

8organicbits• 5 months ago

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.

altairprime34• 5 months ago

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

queenkjuul3• 5 months ago

You can be in perfect shape and still not find clothes that fit. The issue IS the sizes.

bloaf2• 5 months ago

Expecting mass-market, lowest-common-denominator products to be tailored to your special circumstance is the issue.

Normalize going to a tailor, instead of grumbling about how you aren't benefiting enough from the sweatshops mass retailers are running.

mikepurvis3• 5 months ago

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.

jrmg• 5 months ago

Have you measured your waist? Vanity sizing is a thing in men’s clothes too.

wahnfrieden• 5 months ago

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.

tirant10• 5 months ago

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.

Gigachad5• 5 months ago

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

FarmerPotato2• 5 months ago

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)

WesleyJohnson2• 5 months ago

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?

segmondy• 5 months ago

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.

squidgyhead• 5 months ago

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...

deejaaymac• 5 months ago

As a male who has been on both ends of the spectrum (morbidly obese) and 'fit' / bodybuilder I find the whole discussion about size, clothing, weight, vanity, etc incredibly boring.

Buy whatever clothes you're comfortable in and take steps to not be obese, and uninstall social media while you're at it. It really is that simple.

shimman3• 5 months ago

This is the first pudding article that does not feel as polished. Scrolling down the spacing between legends within the data visualizations are not good. Some text doesn't even appear (cut off from the top on the torso visualizations). My font size is increased by like 150% thru the OS but my zoom is still 100%.

Good content tho.

nahikoa• 5 months ago

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.

altairprime34• 5 months ago

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.

Toutouxc• 5 months ago

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).

harrall2• 5 months ago

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.

slopinthebag2• 5 months ago

and then you buy two different brands of pants of the same w/l and they fit completely differently /)_-)

laksjhdlka• 5 months ago

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.

moralestapia• 5 months ago

Is this not the case with men?

crote4• 5 months ago

To an extent, yes.

However, men's clothing is generally rather shapeless, whereas women's clothing is usually quite figure-fitting.

Women also have a lot more variety in body shape: breasts are a thing, for starters, and there's a wide variety in which areas fat is primarily stored.

Is sizing an issue for men as well? Yeah, probably. But it is significantly worse for women.

performative• 5 months ago

a good supplement for this is the Articles of Interest episode on plus size clothing: https://articlesofinterest.substack.com/p/plus-sizes

_alternator_• 5 months ago

I just want to say that this is one of the best pieces of data journalism that I have ever seen.

johnhamlin• 5 months ago

I never check pudding.cool for some reason, but I always smash the link when I see one

bfung• 5 months ago

Hot take (?):

The random sizing today is great:

* If you want a better fit, go physically to a store instead of shopping online and try them on.

* the vanity part is also fine, no need to cause outrage at raising the number and making people depressed cause they think they're even more "fat". It doesn't need to be "optimized"

* Only serves online retail to "standardize", but guess what, 15th standard also sucks... <cue xkcd comic about standards>.

Enjoyed the presentation of the site. :)

sevenseacat7• 5 months ago

* If you want a better fit, go physically to a store instead of shopping online and try them on.

Cool. If you don't have an hourglass shape, none of them will fit you properly. They'll either be way out in the hips, or the thighs, or the waist, or the length (for pants), or the waist, the length, the shoulders, the bust, or the arms (for shirts), and don't get me started on shoes. What now?

_main• 5 months ago

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

tpm2• 5 months ago

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?

wooger5• 5 months ago

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.

sushisource• 5 months ago

Bikewear in particular is a bit hilarious. I'm 5'9", 150lb, so a bit smaller than you, but I have significantly more muscle in my upper body than the typical serious cyclist build. In my experience, the more high-end the bike clothes, the more they expect you to be shaped like a TDF rider, which is to say literally zero upper body mass.

So I have almost the opposite problem from you, where an M is usually reasonable for me on the bottom, but _comically_ tight on top. Even an L is usually way too tight through the chest and biceps for me, but now not long enough in the arms.

I just live with it, because whatever, I don't mind the top being a little tight, but it is frustrating.

elil17• 5 months ago

You are assuming that listed raw measurements online are accurate (they rarely are).

Maxion4• 5 months ago

Or that individual pieces of a garment are consistent, which they aren't. Only if you buy in to the more expensive brands.

lionkor• 5 months ago

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.

advisedwang• 5 months ago

If you shop online and use raw measurements, then it will both fit and be available

The article itself gives numerous reasons why this is not true:

* Patterns are scaled up and down from a single original pattern. However actual bodies do not follow simple scaling. As a result, variation in body size will always result in clothes that fit poorly.

* There is not a universal set of body proportions. The article shows a categorization system with 9 buckets. I suspect women's body's simply have a wider range of shapes than men's leading some men (possibly including you?) to discount this.

* Some brands literally don't stock even the median adult women's size!

nn3• 5 months ago

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.

mixmastamyk2• 5 months ago

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.

stackghost• 5 months ago

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.

mixmastamyk2• 5 months ago

Not really, Wikipedia says it is 2/3 cm +/- 2. Snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.

monsharen3• 5 months ago

"European" shoes differ quite a lot between brands and even models in the same brand. A lot due to factories being slightly different and the materials used, but also in terms of how the shoe itself is designed. Size charts mostly only tell us one dimension (the length) of the shoe. If you're lucky you'll get width at one chosen point as well. Far from ideal.

bdangubic• 5 months ago

DJT would slap 86% tariff on any imported good only shown sizing in centimeters so this better be inches :)

JadeNB• 5 months ago

The 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.)

dang2• 5 months ago

The url includes "womens-sizing" but I don't see that phrase on the page when I view it. "Sizing chaos" is the HTML doc title which is a legit option HN titles (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...). That's why we went with that one.

altairprime34• 5 months ago

For potentially interesting context, I notice in inspecting past articles that the pudding site regularly uses three different titles between the homepage, the article html title, and the title in-page (if any). In this article’s case, the homepage subtitle is much better than either of the other options:

The inter-generational struggle to find clothes that fit more than a tiny portion of women

But I’m not sure if that’s a better title for HN or not. I sure like it, though.

orbisvicis8• 5 months ago

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.

Markoff3• 5 months ago

for non-native speakers: tweenager - a child between the ages of about 10 and 14. (Oxford Languages)

tweenager - a young person between the ages of approximately eight and twelve (Cambridge Dictionary)

seems even dictionaries can't decide on the age

Btw S M L sizes are retarded, why they can't just write normal size like 128 (cm), 134, 152 for cm of height as is commonly used in Europe, my wife regularly checks kid sizes since some teenagers are taller than her. Sadly for adults it's more complicated.

I hate buying pants as adult male since it's complete mess, waist size in Europe in inches, length you never know from where it's actually measured, so if shopping online it's always lottery especially since I am relatively skinny and everything is made either for short or tall fatsos, so if I wanna normal length I end up with huge waist.

galkk3• 5 months ago

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?

mrkandel2• 5 months ago

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.

galkk3• 5 months ago

Old good tragedy of the commons.

scotty792• 5 months ago

Is the distribution of women waistline sizes really bimodal at some ages? That can't be good.

scotty792• 5 months ago

I hope with computers getting better at handling soft materials we could finally get fully automated tailor as a service. Mass production in clothing has so many pathologies that it needs to be replaced with something better and less wasteful asap.

speedgoose• 5 months ago

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.

sbinnee2• 5 months ago

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.

tirant10• 5 months ago

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.

sbinnee2• 5 months ago

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.

RobotToaster• 5 months ago

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...

Al-Khwarizmi• 5 months ago

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...).

faeyanpiraat• 5 months ago

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.

seyz• 5 months ago

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

HappyPanacea2• 5 months ago

So invent new names

severak_cz• 5 months ago

Forget oil rig units. Clothes sizing is the true cursed unit system.

HappyPanacea2• 5 months ago

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.

arh5451• 5 months ago

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.

brailsafe• 5 months ago

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

_trampeltier• 5 months ago

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.

thesumofall• 5 months ago

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!)

vessenes• 5 months ago

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.

MezzoDelCammin3• 5 months 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.

egorfine• 5 months ago

Is overlock a necessity?

MezzoDelCammin3• 5 months ago

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".

fxtentacle3• 5 months ago

Adult clothing no. But for kids clothing you kind of need it, because without the cutting function attaching rubber bands to neck, wrist, and belly seams is very difficult.

fxtentacle3• 5 months ago

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.

MezzoDelCammin3• 5 months ago

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.

fraaancis• 5 months ago

I wonder how many layers of fabric a cutter could get through in one pass (without setting it on fire).

graypegg• 5 months ago

I keep coming cross these videos on youtube from Cornelius Quiring, and it's been making me think about trying it out. If anyone is looking for videos about drafting patterns for clothing, I think he's stuff seems pretty approachable!

https://www.youtube.com/corneliusquiring

153957• 5 months ago

During FOSDEM 26 there was a talk about FreeSewing, a site where you can adapt clothing patterns to your specific sizes.

https://fosdem.org/2026/schedule/event/FVQVTA-freesewing/

morissette• 5 months ago

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.

belZaah• 5 months ago

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.

Shywim• 5 months ago

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.

wooger5• 5 months ago

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).

Aeolun2• 5 months ago

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.

akpa1• 5 months ago

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.

globular-toast2• 5 months ago

True but nobody changes shape fundamentally after puberty. The only change is fat and, to a much smaller extent, muscle (not including anabolic steroid use).

matsemann2• 5 months ago

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.

globular-toast2• 5 months ago

It's not just about that, though. Have you looked at many women's bodies? Some are almost like men: broad shoulders, narrow hips. Some are like boys: narrow everything. There are "hourglass" shapes, "pear" shapes, big boobs... so many different shapes.

It might be possible to have a one-dimensional sizing scale for men's clothing, but it seems impossible for women's. There's at least 3 or 4 dimensions that are independent and nothing to do with being fat.

It's true, everyone can be not fat. But I don't blame people for this. I blame fast food and us not cracking down on food addiction as a society.

abkolan• 5 months ago

What a beautifully made website.

bloqs• 5 months ago

The well is pemanently poisoned by marketing, this is not an engineering exercise

jakub_g2• 5 months ago

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.

anilakar• 5 months ago

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.

d--b2• 5 months ago

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.

altairprime34• 5 months ago

As far as I can tell, this is a key driver of why the EU implemented anti-waste provisions for clothing starting in a couple years: because retailers will just order arbitrary amounts of clothes and shred (!) whatever is unsold, which since they made their profit, doesn’t cost them anything and saturates the planet in formerly-wearable clothes that have been destroyed out of wasteful sloppiness. If they actually had to put in effort to design production runs — or else see their clothes sold at the bargain store — then they may well start acting less “why bother, we got our money, next”. One hopes, anyways.

KK7NIL2• 5 months ago

because retailers will just order arbitrary amounts of clothes and shred (!) whatever is unsold, which since they made their profit, doesn’t cost them anything

This is so obviously untrue. It's painfully obvious that the less they waste, the more profit they make, so there's plenty of incentive for them to order the right amount.

ChrisMarshallNY3• 5 months ago

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.

jakub_g2• 5 months ago

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".

jagged-chisel• 5 months ago

I’m curious to know if that was an accurate assessment by Amazon and if you were (or would have been?) satisfied with the purchase of their suggestion.

monsharen3• 5 months ago

Will risk sounding like an ad but I created a service for this exact problem because I grew tired of the returns. Size charts sucks and it should be treated as a data problem.

You have shoes at home that fit you well, and I have shoes at home that fit me well. If we have shoes that fit well in common, then I know which size to get in your models. Scale that up to millions of users and the problem of sizing is solved. The service is live, it works and it's collecting people's sizes.

Don't want to post the URL but it pops up when you search for shoe models and size guides on Google. Just wanted to let you know that your wife might be able to buy shoes for you again soon.

ChrisMarshallNY3• 5 months ago

Cool. Thanks!

Aeolun2• 5 months ago

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?

throwawy_gender• 5 months ago

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".

pickleRick243• 5 months ago

I was looking for the first comment along these lines. Regardless of your views on this topic, everyone has an opinion and it's funny how the entire comment section finds a way to self-censor.

olliebrkr• 5 months ago

Not sure how we expect this to be fixed when women still don't get proper pockets.

brikym• 5 months ago

Please make one on US measurements and metric.

bnxts21• 5 months ago

I love sites like this

d--b2• 5 months ago

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.

tantalor• 5 months ago

I wish people would stop with the scrollytelling for data pieces like this. It does not help the case, and distracts more than anything.

moodyScarf• 5 months ago

on this website i thought it was nice, although i agree in general. i think it really varies between device and is sometimes super awkward.

abustamam4• 5 months ago

My wife is petite (4'11") and always struggled to find clothes that fit her. She dresses conservatively because we're Muslim but she doesn't really like wearing the long gowns that many Muslim women wear, so she wears jeans and long sleeved shirts.

Anuway, she always struggled to find clothes that fit her well because she's small. Her uncle had to tailor a lot of her clothes growing up. A while back she found a fashion-as-a-service called Short Story, which markets itself for petite women; it basically sends her clothes every X-months and she tries them on and send back the ones she doesn't like or fit, tells her stylist why she is sending them back, and pays for the ones she keeps. Every time she keeps something from them she donates something from her wardrobe (net zero is the goal). And she looks great in them! They're fashionable (to the degree that my dev opinion on fashion matters), modest, and most importantly they fit her well.

Disclosure: I interviewed with Short Story last year as a consulting role but it didn't pan out.

robocat• 5 months ago

If you've got the yen for travel, maybe visit an Asian country where she might be a "normal" size against the population.

I went to Vietnam and noticed the sizing difference for myself: suddenly I was oversized. I've also seen the opposite in other countries where sizes are much bigger and I'm on extra small sizings.

Vietnam is great for getting tailored clothing too - if you can avoid the worst of the tourist tailors.

Worth a try, if you can find a country that has a style she likes...

abustamam4• 5 months ago

Before kids we traveled to Malaysia, Japan, Singapore. But since we are not really fashion-forward I don't think either of us cared to look at clothes there.

I did get a suit cheaply made and tailored in Malaysia back in college. One of the few pieces of clothing that still fits me perfectly now.

npilk• 5 months ago

The opposite issue exists in men's clothing - it seems to be harder to find clothes that fit shorter/smaller men. "Medium" sizes tend to be quite large.

I made a page about this myself - Model is 6'2" Wearing Size Medium - https://pilk.website/2/model-is-6-2-wearing-size-medium

scherlock• 5 months ago

Don't get me started on torso lengths! I'm 5'11 but wear a 30" inseam pants. My torso is long, so most shirts are too short for me. I'm not overweight, I'm 160 lbs, so finding a shirt that actually fits me is very difficult. If it's long enough, its too wide. If its the right width, it's too short.

lrivers• 5 months ago

Bruh. Short leg long torso bro here as well. I try to buy shirts in tall sizes. I can tuck them in!

Good news, Italian sports cars and motorcycles seem designed for our body.

anthomtb• 5 months ago

I have the exact same problem. 6'0 (183.5 cm) height, 160lbs (72kgs), and a long torso. Mediums and even smalls are ideal for my shoulders and chest but it's a crapshoot if they will keep my belly button covered through a normal range of motion. I don't want to bare it and can't imagine anyone wants to see it.

Tentrees, Fox and Prana are the brands I've found that consistently fit my upper body.

Sizing chaos

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