Just like a man's pair of pants with a 32" inseam and 34" waist is a fixed commodity, so should be women's clothing sizes. Sizes 2-30? will be clearly delineated and not subject to size inflation or deflation depending on the designer or store.
First, all pants will be sized in the waist/length manner that men's clothing are with the addition of a hip measurement.
Next, tops will be sized according to a rigid standard of arm-circumfrence, bust size, length, and neck circumfrance. A 10 will be 10 everywhere. This system also replaces the insanely subjective x-small to x-large system currently in place.
For specialty builds (petites & plus sizes) which require slightly different proportions than the regular sizes, the rules of standardization will apply, taking into account proportion modifications, and be labeled 2P-30P and 2W-30W. There is no reason to limit petites to 2-10 and plus sizes to 16-30 as is standard practice. Both groups should be allowed 15 incremental sizes to suit their body types.
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I completely agree with you. I've often wondered (when buying clothes for my fiance) why women's sizes are not based on standardized sizes.
Thank you! This would also work for bridal wear, I hope. Apparently as women have gotten bigger over the years, the sizes have changed so that 6-8 is always average. Bridal wear has not, which is why a size 8 woman is a size 12 in bridesmaid dresses!
Very good idea... Takes my girlfriend forever to shop for clothes; takes an eon for her to decide what to get, then she'd have to try it on... It's absurd considering some fashion designers intentionally make the sizes smaller to boost the confidence of some women, but truthfully it just means I have to wait around the mall's hallway longer...
The convenience of being a guy is that the ONLY time you're not certain about your size is if you lost/gained weight... The only thing I need to remember is L all around/36" waist/size 11 shoes for myself, but for her it's size 3 here, size 4 there, different petite size, 34C, size 5 for undies, hosiery size is this, shoe size is that... If I were to hypothetically wake up as a woman one morning, I'd go insane trying to remember everything... On the other hand, thank God for my PDA phone when I buy her clothing-related gifts.
There's no way the current size-system can be replaced overnight. And it's doubtful that even a supplemental and "parallel" system even be mandated, politically speaking. Manufacturers are organized, and the public interest isn't.
So what I suggest is that a voluntary but government-endorsed supplemental standard be introduced, and that these new sizes would be denoted by letters rather than numbers, to distinguish themselves. After the new standard had been around for ten years, then the government might mandate that all makers include it in their labels.
I suspect the major reason for size inflation is catalog sellers. Women who receive an item that's too small will, I believe, return it more often than those who receive one that's too large, which is a headache for the vendors. So the temptation is to provide slightly loose items at each size level. Then, after this loose fit has become the unofficial new standard, another round of enlargement occurs, as returns rise because some women size themselves optimistically.
I've invoked this clothes-size-inflation phenomenon to make a political point: it's a "market failure" that indicates how the tendency of freely trading individuals can have an anti-social effect even on the traders themselves, over time. IOW, there is a theoretical flaw in the form of individualism that claims that paternalistic regulations on free trade can have only a negative effect.