Is this standardized sizing for men's clothes in the room with us right now?
this post was submitted on 09 Sep 2023
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It's true, men sizing aren't as standard as i thought! My apologies! It is still an annoyance for us all in the end.
Are men clothe even standard ? I am floating in some shirt while some others at tge same sizing feel like a crop top
Definitely not standardized. Some brands aren't even consistent between different items they make.
Dress pants, shirts, and jackets are fairly standardized by measurements. It's not perfect, but it's better than S M L sizing.
The measurements aren't always reliable though. I've got 2 pairs of pants, one a 32 waist and the other is a 36 and they both fit the same.
That's a quality control issue, though. 32 inches is supposed to be the circumference of the waistband. I suppose it could also be the style, if on pair rides high and you have a different circumference at different heights.
As someone who made understanding clothes sizes my main nerd-quest of recent years (see my other comment, lol) , I can confirm that no, men's clothes are not standard either. In some ways they're better, in some ways worse - like, it's one thing for a medium to have a lot of variation, but I would expect waist or leg sizes that are measured in inches to be more consistent.
Alas, finding well fitting clothes sucks for everyone (though ofc, it sucks for some people more than others)
Exactly as youβve described it: bust, waist, hip and leg length, but with leg length from hip to ankle. It would mean not all sizes are available for a given piece of clothing, but it would mean that on the rack or online, you could tell whether a piece of clothing would fit.
Yes and I would also add thigh circumference and calf circumference. I have larger thighs and calves, which is not always in line with hip circumference. For example, hips can fit but not calves in straight legged pants for me.
In this case, would it not make more sense to have more varied materials that are more stretchy, and more brands that cater to more varied sized people?
Standards are great for standard sized people, but itβs also nice to have a selection of non-standard sized clothes for non-standard sized people.
The problem is there are very few "standard sized" women, and not everyone wants to wear yoga pants or mumus.
Short answer: I don't know. Maybe the best way forward would be a sizing scheme that assumes most garments will be tailored to fit properly, similar to how when fitting for men's suits, the most important dimension is making sure it fits on the shoulders, because the rest can be tailored. For obvious reasons, this approach isn't really compatible with fast fashion.
Longer answer: I got so sick of inconsistent sizing that I learned how to draft and make my own clothes. Even when I learned pattern making methods, I found they were steeped in standardization, which often required me to take a more ground up approach and build a custom pattern from scratch, for my body, rather than following a pattern.
What we need is the opposite of simplicity - I think the current problem has arisen from an excess drive towards standardization and our current sizing situation doesn't give us the words or the understanding of the variety of body shapes and compositions.
Bra sizes are a great example of this - the website bratabase.com is a community build bra database, and if you look at the photo galleries for a particular bra size, you'll see a huge variation in the boobs that fit those bras, both in shape and size. Ofc, some of these people may be wearing the incorrect bra size for them, but I don't think that's enough to explain the huge variation we see here (especially given that people contributing to a project like this are more likely to be aware of their correct bra size).
Having gone down the rabbit hole to understand the esoteric witchcraft of bra construction, it is utterly absurd to me that we only use two dimensions in describing bra sizes - the cup and the band size. Anyone who has gone questing for a well fitting bra will know that the process usually involves a fair bit of trying in different bras at or around the size you usually wear, and that's my point! There are entire dimensions of variation that we don't have the tools to adequately describe beyond rough advice like "Have you tried a plunge/full cup style? What about this brand?"
I'm going to tangent for a moment.
Back in the 1940s, the US Air Force's first fighter jets were experiencing a high rate of crashes that were neither attributable to pilot error nor mechanical failure, and they assumed that, because the cockpits were based on pilot measurements from the 1920s, that the dimensions of the average pilot had changed enough that the fixed cockpits no longer correctly fit.
A researcher took 10 of these human dimensions (e.g. chest circumference, height etc ) used in the design and measured 4000+ pilots against them.
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Zero of these pilots were within 15% of the average for all 10 measurements.
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And for any given 3 dimensions, fewer than 4% of pilots would qualify as average
This surprising result was super influential for more than just plane design. The air force began to "design to the edges" and required unprecedented levels of adjustability in designs going forwards, which manufacturers were very resistant to, but the air force were firm in their requirements and manufacturers reluctantly got with the times, because what are you going to do, lose the US fucking air force as a customer?
This set a precedent for adjustability in way more than just planes, once the manufacturers and designers learned how to overhaul their process to account for the added complexity of adjustability. (Summary source: https://www.gse.harvard.edu/ideas/ed-magazine/15/08/beyond-average)
Over 70 years ago, Lieutenant Gilbert S. Daniels' study showed that if you design a cockpit for the average pilot, you've designed a cockpit for no pilot. This was solvable through significant upheaval in the way that planes were designed and built. I see the problem of clothes sizing much the same as this old, solved one, except it's much more diffuse and therefore triggering the necessary upheaval of the not-working system is harder than it was for the Air Force.
Although I did recently discover something related to this that's very cool - https://freesewing.org/ , an open source software project that's building a library of parametric designs. I've not had a chance to try any patterns out yet, but it looks promising.
(I did say it was the long answer...)
Thank you for the websites, I'll check them out! And cool history lessons!
Step 1 would be to get women to give up on the concept of form-fitted clothing, and just accept that off-the-rack items fit about as well as a potato sack, like most men's clothing does. VoilΓ , then I could standardize sizing to just a couple numbers.
I admit, most of my clothings are gender neutral in style. I wear some "unisex" t-shirts and really straight jeans most of the time. I like being a potato I guess ahah
I'm not sure it's possible, because the different parts of women's bodies don't tend to scale in relation to one another. There's the waist-to-hip ratio, thigh circumference, breast size, width of shoulders, length of torso, length of legs -- none of which have much to do with each other.
A woman can have size L shoulders, size XS breasts, size S waist, M hips, L thighs, long torso, and short legs. Another might have M shoulders, XL breasts, XXL waist, L hips, and M thighs, short torso, average length legs. And no retailer would bother making garments that account for every possible combination, because that wouldn't be profitable. (This is why so many women with small chests and small ribcages are sold 32A bras that gap on top and ride up in back, when a properly-fitting bra would be a 28C -- companies can make more money by selling less variety.)
Men, for the most part, have more similarities in their shapes and less variety in where excess adipose tissue settles. Also, as someone else pointed out, it's more socially acceptable for men's clothing to fit like a sack.
The solution, unfortunately, is alterations, either by hiring a seamstress or doing it oneself. (No judgment from me: I keep meaning to learn that skill but CBF to get a sewing machine when I might abandon the project.)
I'm a man who is right in the middle between the standard sizes, and it's very hard to find anything that fits. It's either too big or too small. But I've found a place on the web where you enter all your measurements and then they tailor it for you. It's a bit more expensive but the fit is amazing.
I donβt disagree with all the trouble with women sizes, but as a somewhat taller than average man with long arms, whose belly did not grow with torso length, who likes to stand upright with shoulders back, I can tell you, shopping for menβs clothes is not the simple thing you paint it here.
And god forbid those times when I am fit and have muscles. Thatβs nightmarish for finding clothes.
When men wear clothes like sacks, you can imagine that itβs not because they donβt care, but because they gave up.
I have been a Buyer for a retail chain. This is not possible. Women have a much larger range of body types than men, and vastly different expectations for clothing types and cuts. The only option is to specialize for a demographic and body type.
I've always suspected places do this. My body fits well in River Island, Ted Baker, Yumi, a few others, but really badly in Prada, Topshop, Mulberry, anything that expects a woman to be more straight. You have to learn "your shops". But the sizes are still wild even within brands.
Yeah. It is a Buyer's nightmare too. If anyone tried to produce something that covered all sizes and body types, it would look even worse than Walmart generic men's clothing.
I Buyer's real goal is to minimize overburden and keep turning inventory as fast as possible. The easiest way to illustrate this is if you are stocking something simple like socks. The noob mistake is to order something like XS-2, S-4, M-6, L-6, XL-4. A week after stocking this you'll have something like: XS-2, S-3, M-1, L-0, XL-3. The remaining inventory is overburden and a major problem. It won't sell well and the center/majority of the customer base is angry they found something they like but not in their size. The better order would be something like: XS-2, S-3, M-15, L-20, XL-3. This requires data to plan for well, but is a realistic order I might have placed.
The more broad the size range gets, or the more trendy/bold the style, the more risk there is in tying up cash flow. If no one likes the product it is trouble. If you're stuck with oddballs it's trouble. When I am spending hundreds of thousands of dollars at a time, I am very conservative and I want as much historical data as possible. I would much rather see something like sales figures over the last 10 years show shorter middle aged women have consistently purchased a certain fit, in a certain size range, at a certain time of year, in muted darker color tones. There is a lot of risk when I start trying to fit a broad range of demographics against data that appears to show VERY specific buying choices.
Mind you, I am applying my experience with a chain of high end bicycle shops to something like a department store. Most retail is the same though, and I carried women's clothing at a small scale of a few racks worth. Most buying happens 6 months to a year in advance and it involves spending a ton of money at one time. It is always something of a conservative gamble about trends, styles, and very local demographics. One really bad decision will cost you your job. It is quite agonizing at times. The farther from center a customer gets, the more they fall outside of the available data a buyer has available. This is why most retail seems clickish or type oriented. Overburden inventory and bad cash flow is what kills most retail businesses.
Like with bike shops, you won't find many shops that sell high end bikes that stay open for more than a decade unless they are a hobby business owned by someone with enough money to not care about profitability. Overburden kills bike shops consistently. With 3 stores I spent between 1.3-1.5 million dollars in preseason orders total for the 6 years I was the Buyer. It is fun, but it is stressful to show you what you want to see, things that are interesting but not quite right, and always have the thing you really came for, all at the same time, all the time, for the majority of customers.
Vacuum sealing plug suits from Evangelion. One size fits most.
Lol. I imagine stepping into a plastic boiler suit with one of those vacuum storage bags seals on the stomach.
step one would be to admit i have no idea. step two would be finding someone who did, preferably a woman. step three step aside.
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Another measurement that needs including is pocket size, and then someone has to step up and manufacture trousers with pockets in any other size than XXS
It's complicated.
We have the technology to 3D scan a person to get a current set of measurements, and generate a virtual sewing mannequin. Make that mannequin as life like as possible, standardized, regularly updated, and available to all clothing manufacturers.
Let each manufacturer who wants to use it design skins of their designs, with as much of the physical properties of each garment imbued inn that mesh as the state of the art allows, for any garment, in any sizes, with whatever sizing nomenclature that they want to put on the market.
Let the customer browse, and decide on where to shop based on what they see. It would be nice to also walk into any shop with some clear ideas of what sizes you will be pulling off the rack.
Do away with the size numbers, they're not necessary anymore. Let me introduce you to spray on clothing...