David777
Well-known Member
- Location
- Silicon Valley
Came upon this women's clothing sizing article while researching ski sock fitting issues and I as someone that knows very little about sizing clothing, thought it was ridiculous. Why are American Men's versus Women's shoe sizes so different? Why did that happen? It all comes down to a general group in society I tend to dislike greatly...Marketing and Sales people and their financial $$$ Bean Counters.
What motivated me to post this thread was that I had some time ago read stories of ridiculous amounts of clothing being sold on the Internet that is being returned because many posted sizes tend to be nonsense and much worse for women. Of course that is creating enormous amounts of unnecessary waste since many returns are just tossed into trash by retailers given return shipment costs plus employee needs to deal with such, eventually clogging landfills with much synthetic fibers that are chemical plastics. Part of our throw away society today unlike when we grew up where their were many occupations fixing all manner of goods..
As a small Caucasian male at 5'5.5" 135#, I always disliked buying clothes in stores because invariably, my marginal sizes were limited using the worst color patterns since we smaller men given societal "tall dark and handsome" attitudes, were roundly targets to be abused by the fashion industry. I'll let you forum gals run this thread while I'll just watch.
Inside the fight to take back the fitting room
Why It's Impossible to Find Clothes That Fit
...“Insanity sizing,” as some have dubbed this trend, is frustrating enough for shoppers who try on clothes in stores. But now that $240 billion worth of apparel is purchased online each year, it has become a source of epic wastefulness. Customers return an estimated 40% of what they buy online, mostly because of sizing issues. That’s a hassle for shoppers and a costly nightmare for retailers, who now spend billions covering “free” returns...
This madness is partly our own fault. Studies have shown that shoppers prefer to buy clothing labeled with small sizes because it boosts our confidence. So as the weight of the average American woman rose, from 140 lb. in 1960 to 168.5 lb. in 2014, brands adjusted their metrics to help more of us squeeze into more-desirable sizes (and get us to buy more clothes).
Over time this created an arms race, and retailers went to extremes trying to one-up one another. By the late 2000s, standard sizes had become so forgiving that designers introduced new ones (0, 00) to make up the difference. This was a workable issue—albeit an annoying one—so long as women shopped in physical stores with help from clerks who knew which sizes ran big and small.
Then came the Internet. People started buying more clothes online, trying them on at home, realizing that nothing fit, and sending them back. And retailers got stuck with the bills—for two-way shipping, inspection and repair. Now vanity sizing, which was once a reliable sales gimmick, sucks up billions of dollars in profits each year.
But the most consequential discovery by researchers Ruth O’Brien and William Shelton was psychological: women didn’t want to share their measurements with shopping clerks. For a system to work, they concluded, the government would have to create an “arbitrary” metric, like shoe size, instead of “anthropometrical measurement...
The more complicated issue, argues SUNY Buffalo State’s Boorady, is that most designers still equate “fashionable” with “skinny.” “They don’t want to think of their garments being worn by plus-size women,” she says.
What motivated me to post this thread was that I had some time ago read stories of ridiculous amounts of clothing being sold on the Internet that is being returned because many posted sizes tend to be nonsense and much worse for women. Of course that is creating enormous amounts of unnecessary waste since many returns are just tossed into trash by retailers given return shipment costs plus employee needs to deal with such, eventually clogging landfills with much synthetic fibers that are chemical plastics. Part of our throw away society today unlike when we grew up where their were many occupations fixing all manner of goods..
As a small Caucasian male at 5'5.5" 135#, I always disliked buying clothes in stores because invariably, my marginal sizes were limited using the worst color patterns since we smaller men given societal "tall dark and handsome" attitudes, were roundly targets to be abused by the fashion industry. I'll let you forum gals run this thread while I'll just watch.
Inside the fight to take back the fitting room
Why It's Impossible to Find Clothes That Fit
...“Insanity sizing,” as some have dubbed this trend, is frustrating enough for shoppers who try on clothes in stores. But now that $240 billion worth of apparel is purchased online each year, it has become a source of epic wastefulness. Customers return an estimated 40% of what they buy online, mostly because of sizing issues. That’s a hassle for shoppers and a costly nightmare for retailers, who now spend billions covering “free” returns...
This madness is partly our own fault. Studies have shown that shoppers prefer to buy clothing labeled with small sizes because it boosts our confidence. So as the weight of the average American woman rose, from 140 lb. in 1960 to 168.5 lb. in 2014, brands adjusted their metrics to help more of us squeeze into more-desirable sizes (and get us to buy more clothes).
Over time this created an arms race, and retailers went to extremes trying to one-up one another. By the late 2000s, standard sizes had become so forgiving that designers introduced new ones (0, 00) to make up the difference. This was a workable issue—albeit an annoying one—so long as women shopped in physical stores with help from clerks who knew which sizes ran big and small.
Then came the Internet. People started buying more clothes online, trying them on at home, realizing that nothing fit, and sending them back. And retailers got stuck with the bills—for two-way shipping, inspection and repair. Now vanity sizing, which was once a reliable sales gimmick, sucks up billions of dollars in profits each year.
But the most consequential discovery by researchers Ruth O’Brien and William Shelton was psychological: women didn’t want to share their measurements with shopping clerks. For a system to work, they concluded, the government would have to create an “arbitrary” metric, like shoe size, instead of “anthropometrical measurement...
The more complicated issue, argues SUNY Buffalo State’s Boorady, is that most designers still equate “fashionable” with “skinny.” “They don’t want to think of their garments being worn by plus-size women,” she says.
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