> if some women absolutely can't find something in their size from a specific brand, that makes the brand even more exclusive, like it being "for fit people only"
The elephants in the room from the raw data is it is very clear some brands do not want average middle aged women wearing their products. Anthropology seems to be the most clear about this in that they have a literal gap between their standard and plus-sized ranges that excludes the adult median woman.
Now some brands might do that out of snobishness, but I expect there is a feedback loop here:
1) Young, attractive women want to make fashion choices that signal they are young, attractive women.
2) They buy from fashion lines that don't fit average adult women.
3) Average adult women detect that the fashionable choice is these brands and feel left out, because a fair number of them would also like to be young and attractive again. And a small but significant fraction feel really left out if some clothing brand calls them a size 20 waist / fat / shaped like a rectangle. Clothing brands detect this in their customer studies and respond appropriately.
4) People who just want clothes buy from H&M or wherever and don't write articles about how hard it is to fit clothes.
"Women" isn't really a homogeneous category when it comes to clothing, there is ongoing fierce competition between lots of different sub-groups of the female population to signal lots of different things. Men have it a bit easier because there is basically a 4-quadrant choice between upper & lower class, formal & casual with a lot of intricacy for people who care a lot about what brand of black leather shoe they own. Young girls are closer to men in that they aren't really trying to signal anything at that age, so clothing fits are a lot easier to manage.
> Clothing brands detect this in their customer studies and respond appropriately.
Respond how?
> lots of different sub-groups of the female population to signal lots of different things
Signal what?
> Respond how?
By destandardising sizes. It isn't that hard to standardise if an industry thinks it'll help them; the article suggests there is already a relevant standards body. These companies are probably doing it for a reason. My guess would be maybe someone doesn't want to be an XXL 18 at J Crew so they can go to Reformation where they are more of a Regular 14.
> Signal what?
Age, health and status for women. Group membership too although that is generally to a lesser extent.
> By destandardising sizes
Oh. I thought there was an outside chance you intended a positive response. Ah well.
> Age, health and status
I can understand age. But wouldn't everyone want to signal good health and high status?
> I can understand age. But wouldn't everyone want to signal good health and high status?
Yeah, but generally not with fashion. Male fashion tends not to go to the same sort of lengths to showcase legs/torsos/arms/chest that women's fashion does. For men if they want to signal status they tend to buy a car they can't afford or something.
And male health is one of those areas where it is very complicated. A fat, balding man who smells funny can make up for that with a high income. A fat balding woman who smells funny might be able to do the same thing but I can't help feel sceptical at the idea.
Anyway, long story short, the people who aren't using fashion as signalling can just buy a shirt that fits and move on. It's a shirt. They aren't complicated.
There's also the fact that most men aren't very healthy - you'll often see very fit men wearing "revealing" and tight-fitting clothes that show off their muscles etc, whereas everyone else wears less revealing clothes because whatever they may reveal isn't very flattering.
The same is true for most women of course but a lot of them seem to wear revealing clothing regardless of how flattering it actually is.
People with bad health, low status being able to wear the same clothes as young women with good health and status removes the signalling benefit of those clothes.
> But wouldn't everyone want to signal good health and high status?
The thing with people is that they are all different. There are a lot of people who don't want to be of high status or signal it. There's lots of people who don't really care for health and value other things higher.
Definition of "high status" vary by demographics.
Some want to carry X sportswear with prominent branding, others take pride in high-price tag items without any explicit branding.
The "I identify with this athlete", "I identify with this musician", "I dgaf what you think of me" groups probably don't intersect much, with brands and offering catering to these and multiple others...?
If you are in taller than 95% for men, and reasonably fit, you might need a bigger waistline (think 36 or more), which is still the same length for pants (up to 34) with your socks showing even when standing (depending on your individual proportions), but much wider around hips and legs than you need. I imagine for shorter men, it's the inverse but equally bad.
Some brands will carry slim and extra long trousers, but if I find a model that fits (not all models from the same brand do), I immediatelly buy a few. Otherwise, I try to get tailored stuff, but that's slow and annoying.
For shirts, it's even worse: unless you can find an extra long version, you are going to be wearing a sail and your underpants/ass will pop out when you sit down. But these are easier to get sewed for you as you can just have a single tailor make many of them as needed.
So it's probably easier for median men, but sizes scale exactly the same without regard to actual proportions for simply bigger people.
> I imagine for shorter men, it's the inverse but equally bad.
Not really, as a quite short guy, many shops will offer me to have the clothes fitted, and if not it's pretty trivial to fit them myself. Maybe on the most extreme end of short it's more of an issue, but in general I suspect shortening pants and shirts is signficantly easier than lengthening them.
I'm a 5'5", 110lbs man. I shop at the teens section and get larges. I may not get the trendiest looks, but I get cheaper clothes that fits and looks good on me!
I also tried Stitch Fix, they had a surprising amount of stuff that could fit me (both fashionably and size wise), albeit not as cheap as kids' clothes.
I might grab something like sweatpants from kids section, but for normal clothes I generally prefer a bit more quality. I work remotely so a good pair of pants can last me more than half a decade, so I don't mind buying quality and having it fitted. But yeah, I feel as a short guy there's actually more than plenty of options for us, I never felt that clothes were an issue. Well, there was a shop once that put the smallest sizes on the highest shelf, I don't know if they thought it was funny, but I didn't go back.
That's fair. I work remotely as well and to be honest I just cycle through the same two pants I got from Stitch Fix and a few collared shirts, and some concert merch for more casual outings.
I was speaking more to waistline — I have a 28 inch waist and the smallest I usually find is like 30 or more, so even a belt can't fix that.
Thanks both for the perspective: yeah, even if simply scaled down proportionally, you are left with too long garments that you can fold/shorten, so a much better situation than tall men who can end up looking like cartoon caricatures if dressed with widely available garments.
And don't get me wrong, tall girls (my sister is 6'1") have it even worse.