About the size of it

Women still searching for numbers that match the fit

By Eils Lotozo * Knight Ridder Newspapers

A strange thing happened to me at the Target store in Cherry Hill, N.J., a couple of weeks ago: I tried on a skirt in a size small, and it fit. Small is not how many people would describe my healthy 5-foot-6, 147-pound figure. Heck, the last time I was anything resembling small was in high school -- during the Nixon administration.

So what did that little "S" on the label signify? Merely something American women have been observing for years: Women's clothing sizes are so wildly inconsistent that they're practically meaningless.

Men can buy a shirt or a suit that corresponds to their actual measurements. But in the surreal world of women's wear, size is a fluid concept. One manufacturer's size 8 may be bigger than another's 12. One designer's small might not be small at all and another's large may be minuscule.

The peculiar result is that most American women have no idea what size they really are.

"I'm a size 10 in some things, but I just bought a 7-8," said Erika Warner, 27, who works in marketing in Fort Washington, Pa. "My wedding dress was a 12 and my bathing suit is a size 16." Violet Phillips, 43, a writer and editor in Philadelphia, said her wardrobe ranges from size 4 to size 10 -- though recently she bought a pair of jeans in a 12. "That was a surprise," Phillips said.

And then there's me. I own size 10 pants from Ann Taylor, a Ralph Lauren dress in a 12, and a size 14 bathing suit. I wear a medium as often as I do a large, though when I bought a Calvin Klein sweater last year I had to resort to an extra-large.

It has gotten so nutty that new services have popped up to help women. At http://fitme.com/ you can plug in your measurements and find out what size will fit you in more than 400 clothing brands.

'Anything they want'

It drives women crazy, but when it comes to sizes, "manufacturers can do anything they want," said Sirvart Mellian, who chairs a committee on apparel sizing for the American Society for Testing and Materials in Conshohocken, Pa., which develops industry standards.

Six years ago, Mellian's group tried to cut through the chaos. It surveyed measurements used by garment-makers and came up with standards. According to its chart, a size 10 should fit a woman with a 36-inch bust, a 28-inch waist, and 38 1/2-inch hips. A size 12 should fit a woman with a 37 1/2-inch bust, a 29 1/2-inch waist, and 40-inch hips.

But the standards are voluntary and few companies have adopted them, acknowledged Mellian, who works for the Navy.

Chris Mordi, a spokesman for catalog retailer Lands' End, said, "Lands' End starts with the ASTM numbers, but then the sizes get tweaked, based on research about our customers." That's one reason clothing sizes are all over the map. Manufacturers all have their own ideas about who their ideal customer is, and most designers base their sizing on her -- what's known in the industry as a fit model.

American designer George Simonton works with a model he describes as "my perfect size 8," from whose proportions he grades up and down to get a range of sizes. Simonton, who created an eponymous line carried in stores such as Saks Fifth Avenue and Neiman Marcus, won't divulge his model's measurements, though he described her shape as "womanly." But Simonton's perfect 8 may be quite different from another designer's. So what you get when you pull that number off the rack is anyone's guess.

Vanity sizing

There's another wild card.

Observed Mel Wiener, director of the fashion apparel studies program at Philadelphia University, "We also use that size label to make you feel better." He's talking about the escalating practice of vanity sizing -- putting a smaller-size label on a bigger-size garment.

Every woman has encountered it. Even as we've put on the pounds over the years, we've seen our size magically decrease. That's why a size 10 pair of pants at Express offers me room to spare, though my measurements match the ASTM size 12.

Manufacturers do it because they believe it sells clothes, said Marshal Cohen, copresident of the marketing company NPD Fashionworld. "I've watched women shop and heard them say, 'Oh, I'm a 6 in this -- I love this brand,'" Cohen said.

Women's clothing chain Chico's has become a success story by ditching double-digits and making up its own sizing system, offering mostly loose-fitting knit garments with elastic waistbands in sizes 0 to 3. Mori MacKenzie, a senior vice president, said, "A size 16 loves us. At our store she's a 3." Sure, we buy the stuff. But we're not fooled.

"I bought some jeans that were a size 3-4," recounted Warner, who by ASTM standards would be a 10. "It felt kind of good, but I knew I wasn't really that size."

Contributing to the confusion, some industry observers say, is the fact that garment manufacturers have no idea what actual sizes and shapes the American woman comes in.

First standards

Manufacturers first standardized clothing sizes for men during the Civil War at the urging of the government, which needed to get many men into uniform quickly. Women's sizes did not become standardized until the 1940s. That happened after the last large-scale study of women's measurements, by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and came at the urging of the mail-order clothing industry.

Since then, we've gotten bigger -- not just heavier, but taller. And clothing sizes still are generally based on an hourglass figure, though a big share of the female population is pear-shaped.

"Manufacturers are making clothes for women who don't exist," said Lenda Jo Connell, an associate professor at Auburn University who is studying women's clothing-size preferences. Her data show that the typical American woman is 5-foot-5 and weighs 159 pounds.

A mammoth project called Size USA hopes to fill the knowledge gap. Sponsored by industry group 1/8TC3/82, Size USA is traveling the country with a high-tech scanner that takes detailed body measurements in 12 seconds. It aims to scan 12,000 people, half of them women.

Information from the study will help manufacturers address complaints expressed by the nearly half of consumers who can't easily find clothes to fit. But it probably won't do anything to help the harried female shopper forced to schlep armloads of different sizes into the fitting room in hopes that one might be right, said Susan P. Ashdown, associate professor of textile and apparel at Cornell University.

"Manufacturers need to make clothes that fit well," Ashdown said. "But then they have to get those measurements the garment is based on onto a hang tag so you can identify what will fit you." ASTM's Mellian agrees. "We are one of the rare countries still fooling our consumers with these size 8s and 10s that don't correspond with any part of your body."