Dress Size

Standard Dimensions for Unique Bodies

A dress size is a compromise, and the compromise is visible in its motivation. Every person has unique body measurements, unique habits of movement and unique ideas of clothing, such as the placement and shape of the neckline, waistline and hemline. Therefore every dress should ideally be designed and made for each wearer by a custom dressmaker, who fits the dress to the measurements of the wearer with an appropriate amount of ease, and dresses were made in this way until the end of the 19th century. However, the Industrial Revolution introduced the mass production of clothing in standard sizes, known as ready-to-wear clothing. Standard sizes were also used earlier in designing uniforms, especially for the armed forces of various countries, where fitting thousands of bodies from a limited set of patterns was a necessity long before fashion adopted it.

These standard sizes are purportedly arrived at by statistical analysis of large numbers of people: measure a population, find the combinations of dimensions that recur, and build a size for each combination. The classification of body measurements into standard sizes has been useful for industrializing the manufacture of clothing, because a factory can cut, sew, stock and ship named sizes far more efficiently than individual garments. However, the present system is not ideal, since a significant percentage of women do not match one of the 20 common sizes, and many styles of dress are not made for all the standard sizes, petite sizes being an example of a range often left out. More sizes and broader manufacture of styles seem unlikely, since they would likely diminish the economies of scale associated with mass production, so the misfit between unique bodies and standard bundles is structural, not a problem any single brand can solve.

The Measurements Behind a Size, and Vanity Sizing

The standard sizes describe combinations of body measurements that are commonly seen in the general population. Horizontal torso measurements that can be specified include the neck circumference, the shoulder width, the over-bust circumference, the bust circumference, the bust-point separation, the under-bust (rib-cage) circumference, the natural waist circumference, the upper hip circumference and the lower hip circumference. Vertical torso measurements include the back (neck-waist) length, the shoulder-waist length, which is not the same as the back length due to the slope of the shoulder, the bust-shoulder length, the bust-waist length, and the two hip-waist lengths. Sleeve measurements include the under-arm and over-arm lengths, the fore-arm length, the wrist circumference and the biceps circumference. However, because of the drape and ease of the fabric, relatively few measurements are needed to obtain a well-fitting dress in most styles; bust, waist, hip and a length or two carry most of the fit, and the rest fine-tune it.

The names of the sizes are the system's weakest part. The standard sizes have not had stable names: the dimensions of two size 10 dresses from different companies, or even from the same company, may have grossly different dimensions, and both are almost certainly larger than the size 10 dimensions described in the US standard. Vanity sizing may be partly responsible for this deviation, which began in earnest in the 1980s, as labels were adjusted so customers could buy a smaller number than their measurements once required. Dress sizes are included in the US standard clothing size and the newer European standard EN 13402, and another standard has been produced by the American Society for Testing and Materials. The European standard seeks to address the naming problem as an absolute scale, while there is no mandatory clothing size standard in the U.S., which is why a dress size remains a starting point for trying on rather than a guarantee of fit.