Every woman knows that there really are no standard sizes when it comes to clothing. As we found earlier, most of us have around three or four different sizes in our closet. There are new efforts to fix the problem, not by making retailers size their clothing accurately, but by helping customers unravel the code behind each store’s size system.
As the New York Times notes, while men’s sizes are usually labeled in inches, thanks to “vanity sizing” women can’t match their measurements to a consistant dress size:
Take a woman with a 27-inch waist. In Marc Jacobs’s high-end line, she is between an 8 and a 10. At Chico’s, she is a triple 0. And that does not consider whether the garment fits in the hips and bust. (Let’s not get into length; there is a reason most neighborhood dry cleaners also offer tailoring.)
Comparing Chico’s to Marc Jacob’s is misleading, since (as a saleswoman will eagerly explain if you ever set foot in the store) they have a totally unique sizing system. While most stores use even numbers from 0 to 14 and (occasionally) up, Chico’s renamed the sizes on that spectrum 00, 0, 1, 2, 3, and 4. Still, this does illustrate how arbitrary clothing labels are today.