Clothing sizes confusing

Press, Volume CXII, Issue 33037, 3 October 1972, Page 6

Clothing sizes confusing

(By

NORMAN HARTNELL)

LONDON. At a fitting session in my salon the other day, a client happened to mention she was going on holiday a couple of days later. I replied that I hoped she would have bikini weather. She grimaced. Apparently, so she proceeded to tell me, she had spent several days shopping for a bikini and had come across the problem every woman invariably meets when she buys items off the peg. “If the bikini top fits me,” she confided, “the other half doesn’t. And when I find a bikini bottom that fits, the bra that goes with it is too small.” In other words, she was still hunting for a bikini because she was not what the sizing charts said she should be—which few women are. You are in the same boat, too, of course, if you are inbetween size. Many of my clients, for example, have 37i-inch bust for 41-inch hip and the fact is they can only get garments to fit by coming to a couturier like myself, or making them themselves. I think it is high time that the clothes manufacturers got it out of their heads that there is nobody else about but Miss or Mrs “Average.” The average woman today is not standard anything; she is full of all sorts of quirks. It was as far back as 1957 that a man called Philip Kunick exploded the sizing myths, yet nothing has been done about them. In 1957, Miss or Mrs Average was sft 21 in tall with vital statistics of 37-27-39 and her weight round 1361 b. Yet manufacturers still visualise her as sft sin with a 34 bust and 36 hip! Fifty per cent of women, said Mr Kunick 14 years ago, were sft 2in tall, and that was not much of a guide, either. For as he points out: 27 per cent were under sft 2in and the other 23 per cent were taller.

The average measurement from centre back to waist he also insisted was 15in, yet all garments were measuring 16 inches.

To cover 96 per cent of women’s needs, the wholesale dress companies would have to make every dress 86 different sizes. Obviously it is too much to hope for that women will ever have a choice like that. But it does seem to me that they could at least produce some of the more popular in-between sizes.

There is another problem too about sizing. One manufacturer’s size 12, for example, is another’s 14. It is therefore heartening to know that a massive survey is under way with a view to standardising sizes all over the world.

The survey is due to be completed at the end of this year. After that will come a conference in Milan to get international agreement. Meanwhile, the only way out of the dilemma is to go on buying separates. It is the only way, it seems, of getting off-the-peg clothes to fit snugly all over.