The myth of vanity sizing

I've been avoiding the topic of fit and sizing -which aren't the same thing- for a very long time. I haven't written about it because a truly comprehensive discussion is very controversial and guaranteed to piss off everyone from consumers to manufacturers. The problems associated with issues of poor fit or standard sizes are so complex that they cannot but include everyone in the user-producer stream. This isn't an issue of spreading blame; it's more complex than that. The biggest problem is expectations and beliefs.

First of all, there's no such thing as vanity sizing. Really. I could write an entire book about why there's no such thing as vanity sizing. That is not to say there are no problems with sizing but vanity is the least of them. It's best to understand the nature of sizing before we go crazy and adopt national sizing standards. People are so different from one another that it is an unreasonable expectation that our clothes should be sized uniformly. The day that we should only have one size "medium" across all manufacturers is also the day we should only need an identical dose of an identical medicine for an identical medical problem. Humans are unique.

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