candis report W
e all know the feeling. You take four dresses into the changing room, all supposedly the same
size, to find one is skin-tight, another is hopelessly baggy, one fits around the hips but gapes at the waist while you can’t button the last at the bust. It’s a nightmare. If you are nodding your head furiously now and wishing that, say, a size 12 was always a size 12, then you aren’t alone. A report by consumer champions Which? found that nine out of ten shoppers were annoyed by inconsistent sizing, six out of ten of us try more than one size when we take clothes into the changing room and half of us feel we waste time as we don’t know the size we’re supposed to be. So why does this happen? The truth is that, right now, there are no rules to govern how clothes sizes are defined. Individual stores use different measurements for their size ranges, and they can vary in ways you wouldn’t expect. For example, you might expect a size 12 to be bigger at Wallis, which is aimed at a more mature customer, than at Zara, the willowy young Duchess of Cambridge’s fave store. But on its website, Wallis’ size 12 is designed to fit a bust of 35¼in, a waist of 28½in and a hip of 38½in, while Zara’s 12 is defined as a 37in bust, a 29.1in waist and a 40.1in hip. Yet anyone who has tried on clothes in both stores would swear that a Wallis size is roomier than one from Zara. So what’s going on? Mark Tarbard is Fit Development Specialist at Marks and Spencer. He explains why the numbers on the website bear little relationship to the actual size of the clothes. “Garments
will be made to fit the body size specified in the size guides, but will include what we call ‘ease’,” he says. “This is the degree of looseness of the clothes on the body. At M&S, this means clothes designed for the more fashionable Limited Collection range will be cut smaller to fit more tightly, especially at the waist, while those in our Classic Collection are cut more generously, as our older customer prefers to wear a looser cut.” So the explanation for why I can easily slip into a Wallis 12 and yet can barely squeeze myself into the same size from Zara almost certainly lies in the website statement, “Wallis clothes
us try more than “Six out of ten of take clothes into the
one size when we changing room”
are designed and cut for a relaxed, comfortable fit.” In short, they’re cut significantly bigger than the bodies they say they’re designed to fit. The same issues apply in Europe and the US. They’ve different sizing systems, with Europe using a size 38 as roughly equivalent to our size 10, 40 matching our 12 and so on. The US system uses the same numbers as we do, but a US 8 is a UK 12 and a US 12 is a UK 16. And there are the same variations in sizes and lack of rules as there are here in Britain. So far, so confusing. But who decides how big a size 12 is anyway? And where did these numbers come from in the first
place? And, just as importantly, why is it that we allow so much of our self-esteem to come from a simple number on the label of our clothes? Perhaps the biggest surprise is that
size labels are a recent invention. Until mass production of ready-to- wear clothes became common in the late 1950s and early 1960s, they just weren’t necessary. Fashion expert Caryn Franklin, former presenter of The Clothes Show and now creator of
allwalks.org, which campaigns to get the fashion industry to embrace diversity, points out, “We used to make our own clothes or, if you were wealthier, had them made for you. Clothes were made to fit the body, so there was no issue with trying to squeeze into the wrong size. The big change is that now we try to tailor our bodies to fit into the clothes, which causes a lot of problems for our self-esteem.” The first clothes that came in standard sizes were the military uniforms in the US. Until the Civil War in 1861, uniforms were made at home for individual soldiers. But suddenly a lot of men were required to fight and nobody could wait for them all to have their mums sew a uniform, so mass production of standard sizes was born. After the war, these sizes began to be applied to men’s clothes while women’s were still all made-to-measure. It wasn’t until 1958 that the first women’s standard size labels were devised, beginning with size 8 and going up to 16. These were based on bust size and were used in conjunction with the letters T for tall, R for regular or S for short, plus the symbol ‘-’ for narrow hips, ‘+’ for larger hips and no symbol for medium-sized hips,
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