A Proposal for a New Size Label to Assist Consumers in Finding Well-fitting Women’s Clothing, Especially Pants: An Analysis of Size USA Female Data and Women’s Ready-to-wear Pants for North American Companies

Abstract

In the USA, Canada and Europe labels that disclose garments’ composition, origin, commercial brand or price at point of sale are required. No law governs garment size labels and underlying measurements. Standard size chart determination is not an easy task and has always been challenging for national institutes of standardization, manufacturers and retailers. Moreover, size standards are voluntary, therefore those who initiate garment orders can decide whether or not to adhere to national standards. Since size labels and standards are voluntary, some of the buyers or their intermediaries prefer to target specific ‘silhouette and shape’ markets by adapting their measurements, while others play the vanity sizing card. Confusion occurs as companies in North America all use the same numerical size labeling systems. The research discussed in this paper demonstrates that manufacturers in North America size garments (pants) according to their own, specific target markets (which differ from one another), to cover most of the population; they then label these garments with reference to a single numerical code size labeling system which leads to chaos in the market place. Besides being challenging for the apparel industry, the size label system creates an ambiguous situation for the consumer who cannot rely on the size label to identify a good fitting garment, and thus is spending undue time trying clothes. We conclude that the time has come to standardize the size label in order to provide better fitting clothes for ready-to-wear.