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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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

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