No Standard Woman

Mass production needs standard sizes to make to. The difficulty is that there are precious few standard-sized women to fit them.

Our own sizes, 6 to 20, are a starting point — never an end point. They suit some women as they stand. They do not suit all of us, and they were never going to. Some of us are taller, others shorter. Some have fuller busts, or wider hips, broader shoulders, deeper diaphragms, longer or shorter arms — the list is almost endless. A single set of numbers cannot hold all of that, and mass production does not try to: it makes for the so-called average, and leaves the rest of us to cope.

Those of us who are not "standard" go shopping and come home unhappy. Nothing fits. We understand the fault to be our own, and buy again. It happens again. Many a wardrobe is full of the recriminating, unworn consequences.

It is worth knowing where the standard came from. The sizes the trade still leans on were drawn up after the war, from large surveys of a narrow slice of women — mostly young, mostly white, measured on the assumption that every woman is an hourglass. The American version of it was abandoned outright in 1983, and the number on the label has meant little since. And the women it was built from are not the women wearing clothes today: we are, on the whole, taller and stronger-framed, and often fuller-busted. The tables were dated almost as soon as they were drawn. They do not hold.

Which is why we treat sizing as a beginning. We cut our patterns twice for the bust — once fuller, once less so — rather than pretend one will do. The fit comes from the cut, not from stretch, so a coat keeps its line for years rather than months. And where our standard sizes are not yours, we adapt them, or make to your own measurements entirely. It costs no more to make a thing that fits.

You are not hard to fit. The sizing is simply wrong.