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Comment by gogopuppygogo | Hacker News Reader

I never would have thought this till I started a relationship with a woman who buys several sizes of everything she shops for to ensure she gets the right fit. Women’s attire doesn’t have standard sizing so every brand is different. It’s a giant guessing game.

Basically, the industry needs some standards to help with all this waste.

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My wife also buys a lot of clothes online, and indeed it's a matter of fitting and sending back what doesn't fit. I recently did it too: ordered two pairs of pants, one was fine, the other didn't look remotely like what I ordered, so I sent it back.

In shops, you can try them on. Online, I think it's unavoidable that people try them on at home and send more than half of their clothes purchases back.

Standardisation in the clothing business seems incredibly unlikely. And even when the size is technically correct, it can still be too uncomfortable. You just never know until you try it on.

If you want a truly universal sizing standard that will always guarantee correct sizes, it's going to have to be a lot more detailed than just one or two numbers. It would be a data dump nobody can remember. It might be interesting to have an online service that would remember such detailed sizing info for you and could produce clothes on demand with perfect fit.

You basically cannot provide enough measurement to ensure that clothing will fit.

There's an article about the US Air Force and the "average pilot" https://www.thestar.com/news/insight/2016/01/16/when-us-air-...

The gist of it is: The average pilot doesn't exists.

I'd assume it's not much different with clothing. While the length for instance may fit, the shape of a sleeve or trouser leg may prevent you from wearing it comfortably. You'd need a insane amount of measurement from each part of the body.

That being said, I do feel like the clothing industry could be doing better than they currently are.

Maybe with a full 3D scan of the body. But even then, clothes fit differently depending on the material: stretch, non-stretch, thick, thin, etc.

But everything would have to be pretty much tailor made. If you could do that on demand and automated, taking into account all these factors and making it as personalised as possible, that might really cut back on some clothes waste. But I have no idea whether this is technically possible, and it's definitely going to be a hard problem to solve.

In Australia, we have multiple stores that advertise free returns and include a return shipping bag. The whole idea is that you can return things that don't fit.

I'd assume similar services exist in other places, and the clothes may be sent to multiple customers.

>Basically, the industry needs some standards //

They futz with sizing because it's a part of their marketing. Fashion targeting older/ fatter people will have smaller sizing to flatter the customers.

I think buying clothes that don't fit just because you want to say it's a particular size is far more a part of female culture (in my social circles in the UK): womens' clothes are in "sizes", men's clothes are in measurements (inches/cms).

I don't think the industry, nor many of the customers for female fashion want accurate measurement-based sizing.

Women definitely want accurate sizing and it’s mostly a sexist hold over that we don’t have it. Shopping for women’s clothes is a gigantic pain.

I appreciate your sentiment, but men don't have accurate sizing either. S-M-L are completely inconsistent between brands and even within them. You have to be pretty aware of which brands vanity size, especially if your weight fluctuates. Buying something online is a crap-shoot, particularly if its from a company you've never purchased from before, or from a European or Asian brand.

Fortunately I’m one of the lucky women who has had the experience of buying both men’s and women’s clothing and I can tell you that the latter is unequivocally worse with regards to sizing consistency.

>Women’s attire doesn’t have standard sizing so every brand is different

Neither do men's attire. Even sizes that are meant to be standard (like the British/Italian/EU systems for shirt, jacket and pants sizing) aren't.

I don't buy anything from sellers that don't explicitly give the dimensions in centimetres anymore (which has become standard practice).

But that’s completely different from ordering from Amazon, and not even considered a return per se. Zappos and Zalando operate under this model where you try out different sizes and return the ones that don’t fit.

No it isn't, you can order clothes on Amazon and many women (and men) do.

Can confim, my wife does this for me and herself.

Not only that, when I order clothes from Amazon they always come in a special plastic bag which is already prepared for re-sealing and return, instead of their signature cardboard boxes.

I guess the industry knows that the only way to sell clothes online is having more than half of them returned, no questions asked. It is probably cheaper than having physical stores to try them out, or even than standardizing clothes sizing: just let the client order the item in two or three sizes and return the ones that don't fit.

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