alt Hacker NewsSizing chaos
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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!
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
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
I wish people would stop with the scrollytelling for data pieces like this. It does not help the case, and distracts more than anything.
"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.
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?
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.
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.
I just want to say that this is one of the best pieces of data journalism that I have ever seen.
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.)
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
Very cool visualization, worked great on firefox mobile too which isn't always the case with these types of things.
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
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!)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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
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...).
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.
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?
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...
Not sure how we expect this to be fixed when women still don't get proper pockets.
The well is pemanently poisoned by marketing, this is not an engineering exercise
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.
During FOSDEM 26 there was a talk about FreeSewing, a site where you can adapt clothing patterns to your specific sizes.
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.
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
It's cool to see pudding.cool making the front of HN regularly.
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.
Forget oil rig units. Clothes sizing is the true cursed unit system.
Please make one on US measurements and metric.
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".
a good supplement for this is the Articles of Interest episode on plus size clothing: https://articlesofinterest.substack.com/p/plus-sizes
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.
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)
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.