Vanity sizing is a retailer or designer’s way of making you feel better about yourself by putting a smaller size on the label than you actually are. So no, it’s not you who has shrunk, it’s the label that is lying. Vanity sizing is a device used by shops to sell more clothes, and to create loyalty so you keep coming back to them.
It is a practice so widespread throughout the fashion industry that most shoppers accept that negotiating size inconsistencies between stores is built in to the shopping experience. Just over 60 per cent of women admit they are unsure of their dress size, such is the variation from store to store, according to results from a three-year survey conducted by SizeUK, a collaboration between the government, 17 major British retailers and leading academics and technology companies.
Over the past few years the practice of vanity sizing has sparked a raging debate in this country over women dieting to fit certain dress sizes – think zero, and double zero. "Vanity sizing is all about making women feel thinner than they are. We want to wear brands that flatter us.
We have stocked size zero, or UK size 4 clothes at Browns," says the store’s fashion director Yasmin Sewell, "and we sell them to petite women. We also work with several celebrity stylists who practice vanity sizing to keep their A-list clients happy. They will cut out a size 14 label and sew in a size ten label. It’s the same thing." Designer labels vanity-size too, for different reasons: their own vanity.
Have you ever wondered why designer labels do not offer clothes above a size 14? "Designers size their clothes meanly because they want to keep big people out of them. Having fat people wear your clothes is not good for a brand’s image. It’s a fact of life," says Brix Smith-Start, former guitarist with the Fall and owner/buyer of Shoreditch designer boutique Start. "Miu Miu, for example, is very mean on its sizing.
Its size 10 is smaller than Chloe’s size 10. Miu Miu doesn’t want heavier people wearing its stuff because beautiful people perpetuate the myth that only beautiful people wear the clothes. If you are curvy and have a large bottom – forget it." Even outsize retailer Evans practices a form of vanity labeling. Look inside the clothes and you won’t find the word Evans on the label, just an anonymous logo. Even big women don’t want their clothes to tell them they are big.
According to the designers spoken to for this story, labeling clothes as smaller than its actual measurement is intentional. "Most high street stores vanity-size," says one high-street designer. "It’s endemic, but we do it to make customers feel good about them." In the case of designer jeans, on a visit to Selfridges’ denim department, one woman looking for the perfect pair found that every single brand tried was, when tape-measured, incorrectly sized.
The worst offender was a pair of 26in-waist Rock & Republic jeans that actually measured up as a 33.5in waist – a difference of 7.5in. Nonetheless, our tester was ecstatic to have a pair of 26in waist jeans on, even if she in fact has a 31in waist. Every other jean label measured, from Cavalli to Diesel, had some discrepancy from size to true measurement.
If you’re wondering how stores can get away with this, the answer is easy. Put simply, clothing sizes in this country are not and never have been standardized – so, strictly speaking, definitive dress sizes don’t actually exist. This may change next year if the European Union succeeds in introducing a universal sizing system which will state measurements in centimetres – but right now retailers can put pretty much any size they think is relevant on the label of their clothes.
So, sizes don’t exist as such. But herein lies the problem. Size does exist – in our minds. We base our perceived dress size on the only official data readily available on women’s clothes sizing , which is so out of date – a mass measure in 1952 – as to be risible. Yet it is the results from this survey relating a bust, waist and hip measurement to a specific dress size – a 12 was decreed to be a 34-26-36 (my size today, incidentally) in 1952 – that most British women have locked into their heads as the "truth".
The upshot of this is that sizes 8, 10 and 12 are seen as inspirational and 14 and above as "bad". Rationally (but who is rational about weight?) this is rubbish. What we should be aiming for are clothes that look good on the body. Damn the size.
But it doesn’t work like that. The most up-to-date data on the real size of the nation is available from Size UK. In 2004 Size UK delivered the results of the first national survey on the shape of the British nation since the Fifties. The data from this survey conducted using the Body metrics 3D body scanner (the same device that helped our tester to find jeans that fitted at Selfridges) took 130 individual measurements from 11,000 people. The data is, of course, available only to those who can afford it – indeed those who funded it – namely mass-market retailers.
The survey revealed that body shapes and proportions have changed dramatically since the Fifties – and guess what? We’ve all gained weight, with British women adding on average 2.5in around the hips and 6.5in on the waist, and gaining 7lb. The average British woman now measures 39-34-41. There’s no measurement for a definitive size 12 though, or any other size. Questions which city in the UK is fittest? Are northern women fatter than southern? Where are the skinniest women?) These were met with a wall of silence from the SizeUK people.
What Size UK did was to provide measurements of the population according to age and where they live, which could then be tailored by individual stores to suit their customer base. This demography-style sizing provided just the right ammunition to retailers so they could update their size charts and create clothes that satisfy the size and shape of their target customers.
In Europe Spain authorities are now set to abolish their Standard European sizes and move instead to a system whereby garments will list the height, hip, waist and breast measurements. this is an idea floating around in Spain for sometime, but we'd like to know who the worst offenders are when it comes to vanity sizing and who gets it right? Look what store closet to true sizes, and which fall short off the mark? Take a look into the list below?
Vanity Sizing in the Fashion Industry
Stores True to size
Top Shop
ZaraMango (although leg lengths are ridiculously long in both of the Spanish chains)
Miss Selfridge
River Island
Cut Large
Next
French Connection
Premark
Marks & Spencer
New Look
Oasis
Gap
Jigsaw
Dorothy Perkins
Matalan
Cut Small
Small sizes tend to be found in the stores aimed at the teenagers, at the lower end if the price scale. These would include places like:PilotMango
Vanity sizing in the USA
American waistlines have been growing for decades. Bulging bellies now seem as if they're the rule, not the exception. But, reports CBS News correspondent Kelly Wallace, that doesn't necessarily show in the sizes of clothing, particularly women's wear.
Amid all the controversy surrounding models and whether they're too thin, celebrities are showing up on red carpets wearing size zeroes, even double-zeroes. "Double-zero works for James Bond, but seems insane for us as females!" chuckled Kate White, Cosmopolitan magazine's editor in chief.
Why are the numbers we see on clothes tags shrinking, while Americans are expanding? Wallace compared two pair of Gap khakis, one from 1996, the other from this year. Both are a size two. But the waistline on the more recent pair was two inches wider.
A CBS News producer still wears a size four Jill Stuart skirt from 10 years ago, but when she shops today, she's a zero. It's called "vanity sizing," and White says retailers are doing it because it works. "As a woman," White said, "if you feel like you can shimmy into a size four with one designer, you're not necessarily going to want the size eight with somebody else, so it forces everybody to play the game."
Pam Klein of Parsons the New School for Design showed us two skirts sold now in different stores, both with the same size on the tag. But one's an inch-and-a-half larger. The vanity sizing, she said, enables women to lie to themselves: "You can say, 'I can eat that chocolate and I can be a size six.' "Klein suggested that things might be changing, pointing, for instance, to the Dove ads showcasing women in all different shapes and sizes.
But, she says, until women get more comfortable with the size they actually are, retailers will embrace vanity sizing. "It feels good," Klein observed. "I'd rather be a size 10 then a size 14, and I know that it's the same thing, but when I open the closet in the morning, I'm getting ready and I look at that tag and I'm like, 'Yes. I'm a size 10!' "Designer Stephanie Hirsch, founder of "Inca," said she hasn't down-sized any of her products. A small is still a small. But her customers demanded an extra-small, and she complied.
"And that's become a really big seller for us," Hirsch said, "as opposed to a medium, (which) was always the biggest seller, and now it's extra-small and small." Wallace wondered whether we'll ever get back to reality, the day when, in most stores, the tag matches the actual size of the dress. "I think," White said, "it's going to be a long time." Wallace suggested that to find the right fit women should "suspend your vanity if you can. Try on several different sizes, and objectively decide what looks best."
No comments:
Post a Comment