Oh, and P.S. I blame the Asians. Where most of my clothes are made. They are all tiny people. I think it’s* their *fault.
[/kidding]
I had a friend in college who I used to take shopping every so often since she was an International student and lacked a car. She would look all over for a pair of pants that would fit snug and make her butt look good, but even the 00s were loose. One day she commented that in Malaysia, she wore a medium. I always thought that was kind of amazing.
Men often claim that we don’t have to put up with this nonsense, particularly with pants which come in sizes measured by inches. But they’re wrong, it’s just as bad for us as for women. Honestly it really seems so much worse. You expect a size 2 to be arbitrary, but a size 36 inch waist ought to never be nominally 41 inches.
Yet, that’s exactly what some Esquire writer found in this blog post from Sept. (http://www.esquire.com/blogs/mens-fashion/pants-size-chart-090710)
I have several pair of 34 inch sized Jcrew pants that were given as a gift when I was a teenager, over 10 years ago. They were not my size at all, but for some reason my parents wouldn`t let me inconvenience the gift giver. So I just kept them all these years in case I ever lost all the weight I wanted to.
Then this summer I lost 65 pounds and when my existing pants looked too stupid to wear I got out my 10 year old size 34 inch JCrew pants. They fit fantastic and a month or so later I decided to order more. Naturally I got size 34 since the ones I owned from 10 years ago fit great. They were really noticeably bigger and measurably about 2 inches bigger than the ones I had 10 years ago.
So not only do men have to watch out for vanity sizing too, but it’s getting worse.
I’m still pissed off about the time I tried on a pair of jeans that fit, so I picked up two more of the exact same item in different colors and later had to return them because they were different sizes.
If this is a ploy to make me buy more clothes, it has completely backfired. Sometimes I think I need some new clothes, and then I remember I don’t have the time or emotional stability required to buy the least little thing.
Yep. Even the same item from the same maker can vary across individual items. The size is just a guide to what to take into the dressing room–it all comes down to trying everything on (which is why I don’t get why people get all het up over sizes in the first place).
- shrug *
Or you get a situation like the two cotton T-shirts I bought Mr. Horseshoe a month or two ago. Same size, same manufacturer, same store … hell, same shelf - just two different colors. Both fit him perfectly, *and *were on sale - score!!
A few washings later, one still fits him just fine, and the other one has become mine, it shrunk so much. I swear they were washing in the same loads, too.
I had the same experience with Old Navy jeans. I tried on one style and assumed that that size would fit me in other styles. I bought three pairs, only two actually fit me. I returned the third pair and tried on a smaller size. It didn’t fit. I found a pair in my size that fit and bought that pair. Grr…
I weigh 10 pounds more than I did in high school, yet wear a smaller size.
I was watching some documentary or something about garment workers in Asia. I think it was actually a reality show where these British kids, college aged, (or maybe an American or two in there too) went to China or Malaysia (somewhere in Asia) to try their hand in these garment making sweat shops. There was a certain margin of error they were allowed, in terms of piecing the items together. One girl sewed all day, made a bunch of garments and then had most of them rejected (had to tear 'em apart and rework) because in one instance she’d used two different sized sleeves. In another instance, her sewing margins differed so vastly from one side of the garment to another that her mistake rendered it unwearable. Her boss told her “This would never hang right; it wouldn’t sell.” Now, this boss was really nice to these kids, who seemed really butt hurt that they were expected to work long, hard hours and still produce a quality product, even when they were tired and sleep deprived, hungry and had to pee. That the workers in this particular shop appeared to be being treated well (and that these particular Western kids seemed a bit spoiled and entitled) is beside the point. My point was that different workers are assembling these same garments and even the same worker will create variations in the garments. If you had to sew 100 pairs of jeans together in 14 hours, your work would probably vary a little bit from one garment to the next as well. Right?
So I thought about that scene when I was returning those jeans. My new ON rule is: even if I know it’s my size, I try it on first and I don’t order online unless I’m also willing to mess around with a store return should it not fit properly. I just risked ordering online last week and managed to get a skirt that fits, but the shirt is a bit tight. It’s the same size I always end up wearing at ON (size Barbie), but it’s snug in the shoulders. That could just be my enormous guns, though, so I don’t blame the Asians for my black shirt.
Also, the cheaper the brand the more pieces that are cut at the same time. Have you ever cut too many pieces of paper at the same time and had the bottom ones turn out bigger? That happens with clothes, too, which is why you have to try on every single damned pair of pants at Old Navy.
Time, mostly. I’d be happy wearing something arbitrarily labeled “20” if it meant that it was going to be the same size as all the other 20s on the rack, and that it was larger than a 19 and smaller than a 21. It would save so much time to pull one or two articles off the shelf to try on, rather than six or eight.
I’ve been in stores where I’ve tried on 4s that were larger than 8s - as a guide, trying to shop by size number is largely useless and trying on 4 pairs of the same style of pants wastes time I could spend doing things I actually like doing, and that’s why I personally get het up about it.
I have clothes labeled from 00 (which didn’t exist before about 5 years ago - now some brands have 000) to 12 (‘vintage’ of course) and even some kids size 12s and 14s. I am a small and thin woman, but I have 35" hips which is hardly abnormally small IMO- most clothing in women’s sizing is still big and baggy on my hips.
It’s making things very confusing, but it’s understandable. People are getting much larger on average, there hasn’t been a reform in sizing to accomodate this, so retailers just make everything on a larger scale.
There have been several sweeping changes in how sizing works since the 50s, but the general size inflation and extreme variabilty between brands is relatively new. As is the practice of adding one new smallest size at a time as the rest of the ‘standard’ sizes continue to increase in overall size. There are few measures in place to standardize clothing sizes in the US, unfortunately.
I still shop online quite a bit, but I first familiarize myself in person with the current sizing and cuts in any given brand, which are liable to change from year to year.
It’s true. You can try on the same size in the same style in the same store and they’ll fit differently. I’ve read it’s because the pile the fabric feet high and run the cutting thing through the entire pile at once. That means that the pants cut out closest to the top will be smaller, while the ones in the bottom section will be larger because all that fabric is pushing down on them. Makes sense. This is particularly applicable to cheaper places like Old Navy, in whose factories I guess this kind of cutting is used more often.
(Or I could just point you to Zsofia’s post–she said it more succinctly.)
This seems a bit strange. Following this scheme, we could define the pound as 1/150 of the average man’s weight, and the foot as 18% of the average height. The actual values would thus change over time - but hey, they’re just numbers.