Why are there no standard clothing sizes?

In the Netflix comedy The Good Place, set in a heaven-like afterlife of that name, there are retail stores and restaurants that offer only perfect things. There’s Your Anticipated Needs; All Chocolate Everything; The Small Adorable Animal Depot. And there’s a clothing store called Everything Fits! Anyone who’s ever shopped for clothing for a female body will relate to this last one strongly.

That clothing that fits properly has become something available only in a fictional nirvana seems bonkers. After all, once upon a time, it was the norm. In a time before ‘standard’ sizing, everything did fit. That was to be expected.

That’s because ready-to-wear clothing – garments picked from a rack of identical items - has really only been a thing for a relatively short time in history, especially in women’s clothing. Until the early 20th century, most women’s clothes were made-to-measure, either by women themselves or by professional dressmakers or tailors. In that setting, clothes could be made to fit the body measurements of the wearer. Sizing, as we know it, wasn’t necessary.

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Now, going shopping for clothes feels like a lottery. Venture into the fitting room of an unfamiliar store and you’ll be obliged to carry two or three sizes with you, in the hope that one will work. Shopping online is even trickier: we can’t rely on a size in one brand corresponding to the same size in another. My quick survey of eleven local labels (see table) reveals the measurements for a size 12 woman vary by as much as 10cm in the bust, 7cm in the waist and 11cm in the hips. A woman who fits a size 12 in a Twenty-Seven Names dress with a bust of 92cm would swim inside a Trelise Cooper size 12, which has a bust of 100cm. Similarly, The Warehouse says a size 12 has a waist measurement between 74cm and 78cm. That’d be no use to a customer at Ruby, where a size 12 has an 80cm waist.

This is immensely frustrating for women.

“It's confusing, and it can be emotionally taxing,” says stylist Emma John, who is used to navigating the sizing system.

“And more often than not, the people that are missing out are women whose bodies are changing - maybe through midlife - or those whose bodies are different sizes or shapes outside the ‘norm’. No one knows what size to trust… and potentially they don't even know that there isn't a standard size.”

Rather than blaming the sizing system, Johns reckons, women often blame themselves or end up thinking of their bodies as ‘wrong’ and in need of shrinking to fit.

The variation in size seems to stem from brands determining their own sizing scales, rather than following an industry standard (which does not exist). While we seem to have agreed standards for shoes and to a large extent for men’s clothing; for women’s garments it’s down to brands themselves to come up with their sizes based on their own preferred scale. Brands that design in-house use a ‘fit model’ to test their designs, and then scale the sizes up or down from there.

John explains the issue this creates: “The fit model might be a size 10, or they might be a size six… and it's just a standard fit. So potentially what they're not doing is taking into consideration different body shapes – or changes like a tummy or thickness in other areas."

Jeans are garments that feel particularly fraught when it comes to finding a good fit. No matter what size or shape you are, finding a pair of jeans that fits feels like a mission requiring endurance and mental strength.