Shoppers struggle to find the right size

Garment makers like inconsistent sizes for women's clothing.
WASHINGTON POST
Why is there so much difference in clothing sizes from one label to the next? Shouldn't it be in the manufacturers' and retailers' best interests to ensure some consistent relationship between the number on the label and key measurements of the clothing? Is anyone trying to fix this problem?
The answer, apparently, is no.
In part, that's because of the strange way sizing developed. Also, it turns out, clothing manufacturers like things the way they are.
Retailers do care about sizes, enormously. Each designer or label -- even a retailer's private brand -- has a proprietary fit that is closely guarded. Some manufacturers use measurements from the height and weight tables created by ASTM, formerly the American Society for Testing and Materials, a nonprofit standards development organization -- and two such designers might have similar sizing. Many others develop their own guidelines.
One reason is that there has never been any centralized guidance on sizing from the apparel industry or the government. The sizing system developed piecemeal over the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and "we are still paying the consequences," said Sarah Betts, research associate at Clemson Apparel Research.
"It has come to be that numbers no longer mean anything, and they only had a little bit more meaning to start with," Betts said.
Early sizes
The first clothing sizing was for Civil War uniforms, which were cut based on small, medium and large patterns, then sent to the soldiers so their wives and mothers could sew the pieces into a finished garment. After the war, a system of measurement for men's suits began to develop based on actual measurements, including the chest, neck, sleeve length and inseam.
Around the same time, the development of women's dressmaking patterns and pre-made clothing led to the earliest use of basic sizing, Betts said, but it began with an extension of children's sizes. The first sizes, 10 to 18, corresponded to a woman's age: a size 18 fit the typical 18-year-old's body.
In the 1920s and '30s, those sizes began to creep up to accommodate older and bigger women, Betts said. In the '40s and '50s, the typical size 16 sewing pattern became the new size 12, and sizes have been getting bigger ever since. In the past decade or two, that trend has been called "vanity sizing," on the theory that women feel better about themselves if they can fit into a smaller size.
At no point, though, have apparel makers tried to develop a uniform approach.
"They are looking to find one particular body type to the point that their measurements and their proportions and the type of model they use to fit their clothes [are] a company secret -- they won't share," Betts said. "They don't want their clothes to fit like everybody else's. Part of the development of the brand is the fit."
Unfortunately, fit has been confused with sizing: Two garments with a 27-inch waist could still fit quite differently. But what happens now is that a typical size 8 may have anything from a 25- to 29-inch waist. The industry is unapologetic.
"The brands may skew a little differently based on the fit preference for their target market," said Jean Coggan, a spokeswoman for Federated Department Stores, which owns Macy's and several other chains. "Our I.N.C. brand, which is more our contemporary brand, may skew a little bit on the smaller side, whereas Style & amp; Co. might go more toward a fuller fit because that's what that customer wants."
Making adjustments
Clothing designers and retailers have backed themselves into a corner because if they change their signature fit to some standardized measurement, they may alienate their customers in an increasingly competitive environment.
But nearly every clothing maker worries about the nation's growing waistlines, and we could be at the front of yet another round of size inflation. The last major body measurement data used in the ASTM tables were collected in 1941, but over the past two years a consortium of retailers and apparel makers called TC2 gathered measurements on 10,000 people nationwide and in February started releasing reports. The changes are obvious.
The ASTM tables say a typical bust size of 35 inches on a woman corresponds to a 27-inch waist and 371/2 -inch hips. That would be a size 8, according to ASTM. But the TC2 data show a typical woman with a 35-inch bust now has a 29-inch waist and 381/2-inch hips.
"We found people are becoming pear-shaped, or more tubular, and the old hourglass figure is going away," said Karen Davis, a TC2 spokeswoman.
The users of the data will be retailers and clothing manufacturers, but not because they want to standardize sizes, Davis said. They just want to know how people are shaped so the cut of their apparel can be adjusted to fit more people. What it won't change is that a size 6 to one may still be a size 10 to another.
"They all want to make their own adjustments," Davis said. "Nobody wants to standardize."
Keeping individual sizing standards is part of brand loyalty, for sure. But there is a way to satisfy brand-loyal customers and still take some of the hassle out of finding something that fits: List both the size and a few key measurements.
How about bust size and sleeve length for tops and waist and hip measurements for bottoms? And these have to be real measurements -- no tinkering the way the menswear business has, such as giving a pair of size-36-waist trousers a 37-inch waist.
One hurdle, of course, is that consumers don't want to know how big they are. But the more people don't know, the harder it will be to shop and the less they will buy. That's a bigger problem -- for retailers and consumers alike -- than the passing sense of pleasure a shopper might get from fitting into a size 6.