Why it's impossible to find clothes that fit well (2023)

Inside the fight to recover the tester

By Eliana Docterman

I've always hated changing rooms.It's not just that I hate mirrors made to make me think I'm thinner or curtains that never close all the way so strangers can see me trying to squirm in too-tight jeans. What I really hate is why I have to go to the testers in the first place: to see if I've distilled my unique body shape to a magic number, knowing full well I'm probably wrong, and I definitely won. it won't be magic I hate being embarrassed to ask a salesperson for help, like it's somehowmiguilt of not being short, tall, curvy, or skinny enough to meet an industry standard. I hate that nothing seems to fit.

And I'm not alone. "What is your size?" It's always been a trick question, but it's become virtually impossible to answer in recent years. The rise of so-called vanity sizes has rendered most labels meaningless. As Americans have grown physically, brands have changed their metrics to make shoppers feel slimmer—so much so that a women's size 12 in 1958 is now a size 6. These numbers are even more confusing given that a pair of jeans A size 6 may vary in waist by up to 6 inches, by one estimate. They're also discriminatory: 67% of American women wear a size 14 or larger, and most stores don't carry those numbers, even if they're arbitrary.

"Crazy sizing," as some have called this trend, is quite frustrating for shoppers trying on clothes in stores. But now that $240 billion worth of clothing is purchased online each year, it has become an epic source of waste. Customers return about 40% of what they buy online, mostly due to sizing issues. This is a hassle for shoppers and a costly nightmare for retailers, who now spend billions covering "free" returns.

Clearly modern fashion has a fit problem. And while it affects men, whose shirts and jeans are rarely honest measurements, it's a much broader problem for women, not just because we have more clothing options, but also because we're scrutinized more closely for what we wear. When we get married or interview for a job or play professional sports or run for president of the United States, we are met with a whole set of standards and expectations. We can be embarrassed by an outfit that's too hot, too sloppy, too expensive—take your pick. That is the load that women carry into the fitting room. And when we can't find clothes that fit us, let alone clothes that we like, it can be annoying.

The size debate is an emotional one, especially now that so many shoppers are rejecting labels of everything from sexual orientation to gender and, yes, size. For decades, big box retailers have generally catered to a (white, thin) consumer, even ifAmerica has become more diverse🇧🇷 Now, the buyers are withdrawing.They aremoving awayfrom stores like Victoria's Secret, which market a unique way of being sexy. They aredemandingthat mass-market chains like Forever 21 offer a wider range of sizes in the store. Even celebrities like itBeyoncémiMelissa McCarthy, are criticizing high fashion designers for ignoring the millions of women with curvier bodies.

But behind it all is the same maddening question: At a time when consumers are expressing what they want and need more than ever, and retailers are losing money maintaining the status quo, and tech companies have simplified everything else in the process. shopping. process, why is it still so hard to find clothes that fit you? And what can be done about it, if anything?

I'm inside an office closetin San Francisco wearing two different dresses, both made by the same brand, both labeled as a size "small." They were handed to me by Ruth Hartman, Director of Marketing forTo Bag, a startup that measures clothing from major brands to recommend the right fit, not just the right size, to customers. When I try on the dresses, it's immediately clear why this company exists: the first one is tight enough that it's hard for me to breathe. The second balloons around me.

Hartman nods knowingly. "It's common," she says. “I always try on four pairs of size 8 jeans from the same brand because they all fit me differently.” The situation is so absurd that it seems like a joke. (Actually, it's one of the upcoming NBC sitcomthe good place,set in a heavenly place where there is a boutique calledEverything fits.)

This madness is partly our fault. Studies have shown that shoppers prefer to buy clothing labeled small because it increases our confidence. So as the average weight of the American woman has risen, from 140 pounds in 1960 to 168.5 pounds in 2014, brands have adjusted their metrics to help more of us fit into more desirable sizes (and get us to buy more). clothing). Over time, this created an arms race, and retailers went to great lengths to try and outdo one another. In the late 2000s, standard sizes became so lenient that designers introduced new ones (0.00) to make up the difference. This was a viable, if annoying, problem as long as women shopped in brick-and-mortar stores with the help of clerks who knew what sizes were big and small.

Then came the Internet. People started buying more clothes online, trying them on at home, realizing they didn't fit well, and returning them. And the retailers were left with the bills: for shipping back and forth, inspection, and repair. Now the vanity size, once a reliable sales gimmick, sucks up billions of dollars in profit every year.

So why don't retailers stop doing this? In theory, many (or even most) of them could agree on a standardized set of measurements, like mattress companies do, so customers know exactly what they're getting when they order a "size 12" dress. This tactic, known as universal sizing, is increasinglybeing discussed on fashion blogs and at industry meetups as a common sense solution to America's crisis. But there's a good reason why this doesn't work. And to understand why, it helps to understand how the scale came to be in the first place.

I'm in a boutiquein Rome, surrounded by retro-chic clothes that would have been right at home in Betty Draper's closet: bold prints, colorful capes, high-waisted skirts. It seems oddly appropriate since I'm here to get fitted for a custom dress, something most American women haven't done since the 1950s.

The designer is Tina Sondergaard, a Dane who opened her first store in Rome in 1988. Since then, she says, she has dressed everyone from celebrity executives to Italian rock stars to a German princess who “went by on her Vespa, went on In the middle of the street, he walked into my store and said: 'I need this dress.' By comparison, an American journalist is probably not that exciting. But if Sondergaard is thinking that, she never shows.

As you take my measurements, I am amazed at how many options I have. Do I want to show my arms or hide them? Do I want to highlight my waist? My legs? “In the past, that's what people used to do,” Sondergaard tells me, explaining how the scale worked for most of human history. If the women were rich, they made their clothes. If they weren't, they made their own. Either way, the clothes clung to the contours of their bodies better than anything on the hanger.

In the United States, these cultural norms began to change during the Great Depression, when almost no one could buy food, let alone cloth. At the same time, industrial techniques were improving, making it cheaper for companies to mass-produce clothing. At the end of World War II, these factors, along with the rise of advertising and mail-order catalogues, sparked a consumer revolution both at home and abroad. Tailor-made was out of the question. Outside the shelf was inside.

And the sizes arrived. In the early 1940s, the New Deal-born Works Projects Administration commissioned a study of the female body in hopes of creating a standard labeling system. (Until then, sizes were based solely on bust measurements.) The study took 59 separate measurements of 15,000 women, from shoulder width to thigh circumference. But the most important finding from researchers Ruth O'Brien and William Shelton was psychological: The women didn't want to share their measurements with store clerks. For a system to work, they concluded, the government would have to create an "arbitrary" metric, such as shoe size, rather than "anthropometric measurements."

That's what happened. In 1958, the National Institute of Standards and Technology introduced a set of even numbers from 8 to 38 to represent overall size and a set of letters (T, R, S) and symbols (+, -) to represent height and depth. circumference, respectively. , based on the research of O'Brien and Shelton. Brands were advised to make their clothes accordingly. In other words: The United States had research-backed, government-approved universal sizes decades ago.

But in 1983, this standardhad fallen by the wayside. And experts argue that it would fail now, too, for the same reason: There's no "standard" body type in the US. One-size-fits-all works in China, for example, because "being chubby is so rare that you don't even there's a term for that," says Lynn Boorady, a professor at Buffalo State University who specializes in carving. But America is home to women of all shapes and sizes. Applying a single set of metrics could make it easier for some of them to buy, like the thinnest white women on which O'Brien and Shelton based all their measurements. But "we're going to leave out more people than we'll include," says Boorady.

Then again, most American women are being left out right now.

I'm in a changing roomin Brandy Melville, New York City, walks away from a sign promising "one size fits all." In this store, there are no sizes, just racks of sweatshirts, crop tops, and cropped shorts whose aesthetic could best be described as Coachella-meets-pajamas. Many of Brandy Melville's teen and tween fans love this approach, in part because they all get to try on the same clothes.

For me, it's a mixed experience. I'm 6'1" and while we've already established that sizing doesn't make sense, the clothes in my closet are mostly a size 4 or 6. But when I try on stretchy shorts and skirts, the fit is so tight, it feels feel like you're in your underwear. I immediately understand whycritics saythis store feeds body image topics.

Brandy Melville denies that it is exclusive. “Anyone can walk into the store and find something,” said her visual manager, Sairlight Saller.saidUSA Todayin 2014 (the retailer declined to comment for this article). "In other places, certain people can't find anything." The first statement is patently false: no store can accommodate all human bodies. But the second is punctual. Some of Brandy Melville's looser-fitting tops fit me and might suit women with many more curves than me. This latter demographic is largely ignored by most retailers.

This is confusing business policy. Most American women wear a size 14 or larger, which is considered "plus size" or "curvy" in the fashion industry. And they are spending more than ever. In the 12-month period ending February 2016, plus-size clothing sales reached $20.4 billion, up 17% from the same period ending February 2013, according to market research firm NPD Group. .

And yet, the plus-size market is treated as an afterthought. Almost every ad campaign features skinny models. Most designers refuse to make plus size clothing. Some retailers even launched plus-size brands only to kill them several years later, as Limited parent L Brands did withI spoke(which was sold and relaunched by private investors after consumer outcry).

For shoppers, the message is inevitable: if you're over a certain size, you don't belong. "It's like we've been taught that we should all have a third eye, and if you don't have a third eye, what's wrong with you?" He says McCarthy, the Emmy-winning actress who has “every shape and size under the rainbow” and currently wears a size 14. “If you tell people that long enough, in 30 years they'll all be like, 'See that one? She only has two eyes.'” In stores, she adds, plus-size sections are often relegated to dark areas, like the corner or on a different floor, if they exist at all. “If I have a size 6 friend, we can't go shopping together. They literally segregate us. It feels like you're going to detention when you go up to the third floor."

McCarthy isn't the only buyer speaking up. Earlier this year, Corissa Enneking, a self-described “happy chubby” blogger, wrote aviral open letterto Forever 21 after finding a plus-size section that she describes as tucked away in a corner "with yellow lights, no mirrors and no accessories." "Your reckless disregard for fat people's feelings is embarrassing," she continued. (At the time, Forever 21isthis was not an “accurate representation” of your brand). Even Beyoncé, now considered an icon in the fashion world,has been vocalabout how hard it is for curvy women to find clothes. The designers "didn't really want to dress four curvy, country, black girls," she said of her early years with the group Destiny's Child. "My mother was turned away from every showroom in New York."

Clothing companies say they find it difficult to make and stock larger sizes because it requires more fabric, more patterns and more money. That's technically true, says Fiona Dieffenbacher, who runs the fashion design program at Parsons School of Design. “But if you have the volume of a big brand, it goes without saying. You'll get the sales." The trickier problem, argues SUNY Buffalo State's Boorady, is that most designers still equate "trendy" with "slim." "They don't want to think about their clothes being worn by plus-size women," she says.

Slowly these prejudices are fading away. Victoria's Secret, for example, is trying tochange your nameto emphasize comfort and authenticity (“No padding is sexy,” declares a recent ad) after one of its competitors, Aerie, generated considerable buzz—and sales—by wearing models with curls, cellulite, and tattoos. Nike is using a plus-size model to sell sports bras. H&M expands its plus size collection. And designers are beginning to embrace a broader range of body shapes. (Consider the Christian Siriano collection with Lane Bryant andMcCarthy Line, Seven7, which offer extensive plus size options). That's how fashion is supposed to work, says Sondergaard, the Danish seamstress. “Many designers say: this is the dress, let's try to make people fit into this. But it's the opposite: you look at people and say: let's try to put a dress on that body.

Yet even as size becomes more inclusive, the confusion remains: "size 20" is as meaningless as "size 6." And for now, at least, the solution is not design. They are dice.

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I am in my appartmentin New York, about to open a box thatThey say it represents the future of retail. She's courtesy of Le Tote, the startup I visited in San Francisco. Here's how the service works: I spend a few minutes awkwardly taking my own measurements with a tape measure. I then send that information to Le Tote, which calculates my actual size, not the arbitrary numerical one, through its huge database of clothing measurements. Days later, I receive a box with clothes chosen specifically for my body.

The algorithm behind it all is called Chloe, and she's more encyclopedic than any human salesperson. In addition to tracking my form, Chloe can track my likes and dislikes. If I buy boyfriend jeans that are too baggy, for example, I can tell Chloe that I don't like that look, even though it technically looks good on me. Next time Chloe will know how to downsize.

Online retailers are eager for this technology, which could allow them to acquire more customers. A Boston-based startup with its own measurements database, True Fit works with more than 10,000 brands, including Nordstrom, Adidas, and Kate Spade. Their algorithm asks shoppers to enter the size and brand of the shoe, shirt, dress, etc. which one fits best; then recommend products accordingly.

These services are not perfect. Le Tote, for example, doesn't yet offer petite and plus size options, and neither do many of the brands that work with True Fit. And it's hard to predict personal style. As True Fit co-founder Romney Evans says, "You can have someone who technically looks good in a horizontal striped jumpsuit but hates Beetlejuice." However, to her credit, Chloe found clothes that worked well for my body. When I opened the Le Tote box, almost everything fit.

We alsoclose to resolving the crisis of scale? Yes and no. Startups like True Fit and Le Tote are certainly taking steps in the right direction, cutting through the chaos of online shopping to deliver clear, actionable information. The same goes for brands like Aerie and designers like McCarthy, who are proving that it's good business to push the boundaries of traditional sizes.

There are many other entities trying to start a retail revolution. Among them: Body Labs, which creates 3-D models of the human body; Amazon, which recently patented an algorithm similar to True Fit; Gwynnie Bee, which offers a clothing subscription service for plus-size women; and Fame & Partners, which allows shoppers to design their own dresses. It is too soon to say which ones will be successful.

But even if everyone flourishes and size becomes radically inclusive and transparent, there's no guarantee that shoppers will like what they see in the mirror. Vanity sizes work because deep down, we're all a bit vain. And as far as it goes, the fashion industry can't change its raison d'être: to make us feel better versions of ourselves, one outfit at a time. Sometimes this requires deception. It often drives us crazy. That's why I hate fitting rooms, until I find something I love. 🇧🇷

Graphic sources: Lynn Boorady, SUNY Buffalo State; ASTM International; false images; Peoplemagazine; npr
Fotos: Twiggy, Kaling: Getty Images; Collins: AP; Winfrey: Dave Allocca—DMI/The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images

Correction: The original version of this story mischaracterized the number of partners/employees at startup True Fit. As of August, the company works with more than 10,000 brands.