Because Sizes Aren’t Written In Stone : Going Shopping With a ‘Perfect Size 8’ Shows Why There’s No Such Thing
When you go shopping, is Goldilocks your middle name?
Do you search in umpteen stores, try on umpteen Size 8 garments and find something wrong with the fit of every one: too big, too small, too short, too long, too something? Until, maybe, one is just right.
To understand why every Size 8 isn’t created equal, we started with a 36-year-old fit model. “Jane,” who earns about $100,000 a year telling manufacturers how to correct their garments, requested anonymity so she could be brutally honest about the jackets, pants, skirts and dresses she tried on in two department stores.
The garments varied only by a few degrees (save for a very large dress), but even an inch here or there is enough to make any Jane reach for another size--or her credit card.
Shopping with Jane is an upper. Although she has the perfect body for her profession--5 feet, 6 inches tall, with a 36-inch bust, 27-inch waist and 38-inch hips--not every garment looked great. But unlike the rest of us, Jane knew why.
Every firm has its own “finished garment measurements,” she explained. These are based on years of analyzing which measurements sell best in the stores. A Size 8 hip, for example, could range from 39 inches to 41 inches.
Trends also play a role, and sometimes catch consumers off guard. Shoulder pads, for example, have gone out, bringing some clothing closer to the body. Shrunken T-shirts, fashionable narrow jackets and higher armholes feel tight to women who have spent the last few years in oversized clothing.
An East-versus-West factor can also affect sizing. New York fit models are expected to have smaller hips. “But we’ll see,” said Jane as she put on an Ellen Tracy skirt.
It was fine around the hips and even a bit big in the waist. A Ralph Lauren Lycra skater-style dress was a little snug in the rear. But a pair of Lauren’s khaki pants and a pleated skirt were roomy. “I swear it makes me feel good,” Jane said. “I feel I could go into a Size 6.”
Just what Ralph wanted. Slightly loose is better at retail. It flatters egos and cuts down on returns--especially for catalogue companies. Huge, however, is another matter.
A Liz Claiborne dress was so big it was comical. Jane turned it inside out. The designer, fit model, pattern and sample makers weren’t at fault, she said.
“We work our brains out. We get things down to a sixteenth of an inch on the sample.” Mass production by contractors “who didn’t get the construction right” was the problem.
After removing a pair of Ellen Tracy narrow-legged black knit pants that were far too long, Jane concluded that an inferior fabric, not the sample fabric, had been used and no one realized how much it would stretch.
Some manufacturers, such as Los Angeles-based Tina Hagen, ignore traditional sizing and make their garments in small, medium and large. “The fit is not as exact. You don’t get the garment to the inch,” said Hagen, who begged some consumer compassion for the manufacturer’s position.
“There has to be some forgiveness on the part of the consumer. You plan, you strategize and a lot of it comes down to ‘What is the fabric doing?’ and ‘What is your sewing contractor doing?’ that is changing the fit on a garment. And then there are a lot of manufacturers who choose to fit a certain way.” She points out that junior sizes are sometimes cut on the small side, while designer-label garments are often cut more generously.
Customers can’t control manufacturers’ mistakes or predilections, but they can reduce their own shopping errors. To test how well a jacket fit, Jane rotated and lifted her arm. If a jacket is well made, it won’t ride up.
She included puckers around shoulder seams as signs of bad fit, and she checked to make sure that blazers looked as trim in back as they did in front.
A woman should be able to sit in a skirt and not feel “bound and gagged”--at least that’s Sally Nichols’ credo. “Basically, you should be able to hail a taxi in it,” said the former Los Angeles designer and pattern maker, who teaches at Otis College of Art and Design.
In addition to taxis, designers should be thinking about older women, Nichols said. An older woman might weigh the same as a manufacturer’s younger Size 8 model, but her shape is different.
While industry-wide standard sizing might not solve every fit problem, Nichols said that “it would be a great place to start.”
The process actually has started at the American Society for Testing and Materials’ Institute for Standards Research, a nonprofit organization based in Philadelphia. Executive director Kathleen Riley is appalled by most current statistics.
“The last anthropometric study on the U.S. population was done in 1938 by the Agriculture Department,” she said. The subjects were thin post-Depression women.
“The numbers are getting lower and lower as we are getting bigger and bigger. I think Ann Taylor even has a Size 0,” Riley said, referring to sizes today and government standards established in 1942. Then, a woman with a 32-inch bust, 23-inch waist and 34-inch hips wore a Size 8.
To get new standard measurements for women ages 18 to 55, the institute plans to start a survey in June--if it can raise $1 million from apparel manufacturers.
The information would go into a database and reflect what the ethnically diverse population of American women looks like today,” Riley said. “An apparel manufacturer would be able to find what an average Asian woman living in the Southeast, for example, looks like.”
Once the database is complete, Riley envisions a number of changes, including “measurements on the labels of women’s clothing”--just as men already have.
The agency has already tackled fit standards for women 55 and older. The results of that survey were released in October. And the information--provided by 7,000 women in the fastest-growing segment of the population--reaffirmed that they need retail first aid.
“They might find they have trouble closing a top button because their shoulders slope a bit,” Riley said. “Their buttocks flatten and their stomach pooches, so they are turning their pants backward.”
The new body measurement tables are available for $18 from the institute, but there hasn’t been a stampede by manufacturers (nor money pouring in for the next survey). Riley said pattern makers and people in quality control want the information. “But it’s difficult to get a lot of CEOs to participate because they’re not going to get a return on their investment for a few years down the road, and some are a little shortsighted.”
The good news, Riley said, is that, based on the 55-plus survey, “a number of dress-form makers have made new forms. And I’ll tell you, these look like older women.”
