Why doesn’t it fit? How clothing size systems fail women

Table 2: Vanity Sizing? Common size charts given by Australian Retailers (above) is contrasted to the AS1344 (below).  Note the transposing of sizes, where a size 8 on the high street has the same measurements as the Australian standard’s size 12.

Clothing brands who do adjust their ranges to suit the customers see benefits. In 2003 Ripcurl undertook a survey of its customer base, namely females between 12 and 24 years.  They changed their sizing and reported an 86 per cent uplift in sales.

The discussion of ‘thin ideals’ culminates in the size zero debate. Size zero is the result of vanity sizing, which led a US size 4 (AU 8) being transpose to a size 0 as retailers sought to adjust their sizes to fit the increasing size of their customers. Kirstie Clements, former editor of Australian Vogue, places some of the blame with high-end designers who only provide very small sizes for content, leaving the magazine ‘little option’ but to employ models who fit those samples, despite the awareness of associated health risks. Clements believes that the fashion industry’s interpretation of beauty vis-à-vis the female body is a distortion of healthy weight and body size: they “get so caught up in the hype of how brilliant clothes look on a size 4, they cannot see the inherent danger in their message”.

These restrictive size ranges have the effect of sorting women into “acceptable” and “non-acceptable” body sizes. Susan Benson argues that so-called “bad” bodies are the external sign of people who do not count for much: fat and slackness reflect internal failure.  This attitude is then carried over to other environments.  Prudence Black demonstrates how the strict controls over the height and weight of Australian air hostess serves to regulate the female body in the workplace.

Putting the health risk of obesity aside, the restriction on clothes sizes by many retailers means that women over a certain size cannot access fashion. And the clothing that they can access are often less fashionable, shapeless ‘fat sacks’, ‘tents’ or ‘camouflage wear’.  This serves to distinguish the larger body from the thin ideal.

Clothing size labels are not just information (or even aspirational in the case of size zero), they carry an important psychological significance.  Size labels provide a way for women to situate their bodies with a range of acceptable cultural categories.