Ladies (and possibly gentlemen?), there has been much demand for a well-researched discourse on vanity sizing. I did some cursory Googling on the subject and read up on Wikipedia, so naturally I am now an expert.* My thoughts and feelings follow.

Vanity sizing. Essentially, it’s the reason I have a top from Glassons circa 1998 that is a size 10, yet tops I buy from Glassons in the present-day are a size 6. I hasten to add, I have only increased in size since I was a wee Megan, so clearly some crazy shenanigans are going on. But WHY?**

I have two theories:

1. the clothing manufacturing industry knows that the media has told us that being bigger is badder, and is trying to make us buy more clothes by assuming that we’ll say “hooray! I am only a size 10 when my entire life I thought I was a 12. I shall now buy 17 items instead of just the plain black tshirt I came in to get”; or
2. it’s an accident. We are plainly getting bigger and bigger: see Elizabethan homes for hilarious midget-height doorframes. See also: increased seat sizes on modern aircraft. It stands to reason that fit models (the lovely ladies
   cialis online

   they measure the clothes on in the workrooms) are also getting bigger. Since sizing isn’t standardized under weights and measures legislation, it gets all crazy and out of whack as manufacturers try to adjust for the times.

Cynical Megan thinks it is number (1). However, how FRICKING annoying is it when you go into a store and pick up your size, think to yourself “meh, who can be bothered with trying things on? I will just assume that I haven’t gained or lost weight in the past fortnight since I last impulse purchased a dress here”, and then get home and realise you could in fact also make a hat from the leftover fabric in the item you just bought/don’t think you can wear that dress because technically it has cut off the circulation below your waist? Very annoying, is how annoying it is. In fact, so annoying that it actually acts as a barrier to the impulse shopping that they so badly want us to engage in. Sometimes I don’t have half an hour to faff about trying to find my size in things!

Maybe it’s (2). Maybe the poor clothing manufacturer people just keep making weird mistakes that oddly only make us think we are getting smaller? Kathleen Fasanella (a pattern maker) states that vanity sizing is a myth, here. It’s a good piece and I recommend you read it. Amongst other seemingly excellent points she states:

“It’s best to understand the nature of sizing before we go crazy and adopt national sizing standards. People are so different from one another that it is an unreasonable expectation that our clothes should be sized uniformly. The day that we should only have one size “medium” across all manufacturers is also the day we should only need an identical dose of an identical medicine for an identical medical problem. Humans are unique.”

She then gives the example of Western wear versus tutus. A person in the middle of the range of lady cowboys will most likely be larger than a middle of the range ballerina lady, so the medium (representing the middle) will be larger in the chaps and fancy Western shirts than it is in tutus. Makes sense I guess. Although, I don’t see why this is an argument for not standardising sizing. This just means that tutus in size M would be too small for mid-range cowgirls. Big deal? I’d be interested in your thoughts below, because I am pretty sure this will give rise to some Feelings about how our body image is manipulated via size tags and the media.

She also makes some good points as follows:

“A medium to a manufacturer is a reference calculation of needed fabric purchases. Since the medium represents -statistically speaking- their average customer based on sales, the quantities of fabrics ordered are based on multiples of those measures … For this reason alone a manufacturer will not want to change the sizing of their medium because it directly impacts utilization of all their other sizes…”

- and -

“Another thing people drag out as evidence of vanity sizing is the “inflation” of sizing numbers, that because what’s known now as a size 4 was formerly designated as a size 16 (pre 1960’s) that this is proof of size inflation but that’s not true either. The reason is that old sizes were based on -yet another- arcane principle related to pattern making and sizes were designated based on something known as “scale”.”

So, I basically am feeling her points and goodness knows I don’t work in the industry and so can’t really put together a reasoned argument to rebut this. However, I do have some unanswered questions:

1. why on earth do sizes from the SAME company keep going down and down and down? Surely their customer base doesn’t change that much – is this purely an economics situation?
2. why can’t they even get it right from one item to the next – items that are in the same store at the same time? I appreciate there are fluctuations caused by issues with changes in fit models or by new styles being rolled out…but really?
3. And finally, how is it possible that things have evolved so radically in the past 13 years that a size 6 is too large for me (largely because I am on the petite side in the bust region) when I used to be a size 10?

I remain unsatisfied and suspicious. My research continues and, in what must be the most exciting news of your life, I will continue to post very short updates on what I find out.

*not at all an expert. Obviously.

**yep, 13 years later it’s still going strong. In fairness, I think it’s 99% plastic and that stuff takes 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 years to decompose.