Ladies' clothing labels stretch the truth

By Richard Morin
The Washington Post

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Anyone looking for evidence to support the theory that everything is relative needs to go no farther than the racks in any women's clothing store, where pants labeled as size 8 can be anywhere from a size 4 to 14, depending on the manufacturer and how much the garment costs.

At least that's what Tammy Kinley of the University of North Texas School of Merchandising found when she and a team of researchers meticulously measured 1,011 pairs of women's pants in different sizes from different manufacturers at 20 retail stores in Texas.

Women, you can guess what they found: huge variations in garments that purportedly were the same size, Kinley reported in a recent issue of Clothing & Textiles Research Journal.

Some of the discrepancies defied belief.

Kinley measured the waist circumference of 139 pairs of pants labeled "size 4" and found they differed by nearly 9 inches, from 23 inches to 31-1/2 inches.

She found the same thing in 170 pairs of size 10 pants, where the difference ranged from 27 to 34 inches.

And size 14 pants varied from slightly more than 30 inches — smaller than some manufacturers' size 4 — to a generous 38 inches.

In all six sizes studied, the range of variation in waist circumference was never smaller than 6.2 inches.

Similar disparities surfaced when her research team measured the dimensions of the inseam and crotch seam of each pair of pants.
 
The problem is that manufacturers of women's clothes have great leeway in determining exactly what is a size 8.

There are, of course, government guidelines, developed largely in the 1940s after a large-scale measuring survey of 15,000 women conducted by the Agriculture Department's National Bureau of Home Economics.

But in garments produced for the mass market, those standards are honored more in the breach than in the observance, Kinley said.

For years women have been wary of size labels, based on bitter experience. Variations in sizing is the leading reason many women are hesitant to shop for clothes over the Internet.

Kinley also discovered that pricey pants were consistently cut fuller, allowing them to fit a larger woman than similarly sized but less expensive offerings.

That's strong evidence, she suggested, that clothing manufacturers engage in what she called "vanity sizing": making the pants bigger to get size-conscious women to pay extra for the little white lie on the label.