We’ve all had it happen to us, you find a shirt or pair of pants that you really like on a site online, you consult the website’s size charts for the sizing that best works for you, you cross your fingers and order in. When your order arrives, surprise, surprise what you get is a size too big or a size too small for you. This is a common problem everyone has with shopping, especially when we order clothes online without being able to try them on. Why then is this so rampant?
The good folks over at Vox.com have done all the necessary research into the history of clothing sizes and how they became so important to how we view clothes and ourselves in the 21st century. They turned up some seriously interesting things, like Vanity Sizing, a marketing tools that fast fashion brands use to encourage us to buy clothes we don’t need because we think wearing a smaller size means we are thinner than we really are. They also talk at length about how sometimes how a design label sizes it’s clothing has a lot more to do with the target market they’re trying to sell their clothes to than actually how the clothes fit the person buying them.
Vox does a stellar job of summarizing all of this fascinating information into 4 minutes without losing any of the important plot points. Check it out here.