Page 127 - Anthropometry, Apparel Sizing and Design

Apparel size designation and 5

labeling

M.-E. Faust
Philadelphia University, Philadelphia, PA, United States, Universit eduQu ebec a `
Montr eal (Uqa `m), Montreal, QC, Canada

5.1 Introduction

Ever since people began wearing ready-to-wear clothes, retailers have desired to help
customers in finding the garment that would suit them best. One common way of
doing this was to attach to the garment what is called today the size designation.
As helpful as it could be, it seems that size designation doesn’t provide consumers
that much help anymore. According to some researchers, women, particularly in
Western society, have a hard time finding the garment that suits them best with the
sole information of the actual size designation. One reason is because size designation,
which provides a single number 8, 10, 12, etc., was initially supported by underlying
body measurements and body shapes, but the meaning seems to have been lost over
the years. Additionally, at the beginning of the ready-to-wear era, women knew that
ready-to-wear garments didn’t exactly meant “ready-to-wear” but also meant that it
may require alterations, which most women knew how to do at the time.
This being mentioned, it seems obvious that the garment industry needs to adjust
for three major reasons. First, it appears that people have lost knowledge of what the
measurements behind the size number are. Second, women nowadays take for granted
the meaning of ready-to-wear, and only a few are able and willing to alter their gar-
ments. Lastly, many companies are now distributing worldwide, which makes it even
more challenging for both parties: retailers/brands from different parts of the world
and consumers from different ethnicities, with different shapes, or living in a different
geographic area. The solution may reside in a more detailed size designation. This
chapter will start by covering briefly how size designations were developed particu-
larly in North America and what is the perceived value today. Then, it will present
what could be, according to our research, an interesting global size designation and
how it could be implemented. This goes without mentioning one of the most important
challenges: what it should look like and what should be written on the size designation.

5.2 The importance of size designations

It is not rare nowadays to read that size designations in the United States have not
evolved properly to serve their intended purpose, to help consumers find garments that
suit them best. The same is true in Canada where those apparel size designations were
Anthropometry, Apparel Sizing and Design. https://doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-08-102604-5.00005-6
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