Why Nothing Fits: The Truth About Clothing Sizes & Fit

I’m Laura Rae and I am a full-time sewing teacher. I teach technical garment making, pattern drafting and measuring.

I spend an enormous amount of my time with women who have bought a commercial sewing pattern, followed the instructions, cut out their fabric — and then discovered that it simply doesn’t fit.

So, we start troubleshooting.

Is the bust too tight? Are the shoulders too wide? Is there too much fabric across the back? Is the waist in the wrong place? Is the neckline sitting correctly?

And eventually, the question usually becomes:

“What am I doing wrong?”

Or worse:

“What is wrong with my body?”

For the last 18 months, I’ve spent a huge amount of time trying to answer a slightly different question:

What if the problem isn’t us? What if the problem is the system?

The more I have researched standardised clothing sizes, the more baffled I have become by how little the system seems to reflect the people it is supposed to fit.

I thought I was missing something. Why am I the only person looking into this? Why isn't everyone talking about it? Why aren't more people questioning a system that seems so obviously incapable of representing the enormous diversity of real human bodies?

But then I started digging, and I discovered something quite different. I wasn't the only person asking these questions at all. There are researchers, academics, pattern cutters, garment makers, body activists and industry professionals who have been questioning clothing sizing for decades. People have been researching the problem. They've been challenging the industry. They've been developing different approaches to fitting. They've been trying to find better ways of making clothes fit real people.

The voices are there. The problem is that the system isn’t listening.

The more I learned, the more I realised that if I wanted to understand why nothing fits, I needed to go right back to the beginning.

Where did our clothing sizes come from?

We tend to talk about clothing sizes as though they are scientific measurements. A size 10 is a size 10. A size 12 is a size 12. A 38-inch bust is a 38-inch bust. But clothing sizes aren't actually measurements of ‘us’ at all.

Standardised sizing is a system developed to categorise bodies sufficiently enough to make the manufacture and sale of mass-produced clothing possible.

That’s all it is, and yet we place so much of our worth on these arbitrary numbers.

Furthermore, the history of that system is much more complicated than the little number on the label would have us believe.

The American Experiment

One of the most significant early attempts to scientifically establish women's clothing measurements in the United States was carried out by the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Bureau of Home Economics, in cooperation with the Works Progress Administration.

The research took place between 1939 and 1940 and was published in 1941 as Women's Measurements for Garment and Pattern Construction, by Ruth O'Brien and William C. Shelton. The scale of the project was impressive. The researchers collected weight and 58 body measurements from 14,698 women across several American states.

The intention was entirely reasonable: to collect reliable information about women's bodies that could be used to improve the fit and manufacture of clothing and sewing patterns. The researchers recognised the importance of accurate measurement and used trained measurers and defined procedures in an attempt to produce reliable data.

Looking more carefully at who that data actually represented, however, highlights some significant limitations. Of the 14,698 women measured, 10,042 were ultimately included in the main analysis. The original report gives reasons for exclusions, including measurement errors, missing information, age and other criteria. It also explicitly identifies women described at the time as “non-white” and women described as “deformed” among those excluded from the final analysis.

This terminology is extraordinarily uncomfortable — and rightly so. In today's world, the exclusion of people on the basis of race, disability, age or body shape, and the language used to describe them, would be completely unacceptable.

The report was produced in 1941, within the social and scientific attitudes of its time. What I find particularly troubling is that the legacy of this research didn't simply disappear when the study ended. The data and methodologies developed from these early surveys helped lay the foundations for the sizing systems that followed — systems that have influenced clothing and pattern sizing for generations.

And that leaves us with an uncomfortable question:

How much of the sizing system we still use today is built on measurements from people who were never representative of the population in the first place?

The study was not useless. Far from it. It was an ambitious attempt to solve a genuine problem facing a rapidly developing ready-to-wear industry. It does however mean we need to be careful about what we ask the study to tell us.

The research itself showed how complicated women's bodies are. The researchers discovered that women's bodies couldn't simply be described by one or two measurements. Different body measurements were related to one another, but not perfectly. Height didn't tell you everything about someone's width. Bust measurement didn't tell you everything about their waist or hips. Two women could have the same bust measurement and have completely different proportions.

Importantly, the researchers themselves recognised these limitations and advised caution when applying the data. They understood that the measurements collected were a representation of the women studied, rather than a perfect formula for every woman's body.

Yet over time, this complex dataset became part of the foundations on which standardised clothing sizing was developed. The clothing industry needed a system that was simple enough to manufacture and sell clothing at scale.

And this is where the tension begins.

We took complex information about real human bodies and turned it into categories — and then, over time, started treating those categories as though they were descriptions of individual people.

Britain’s Journey

The United Kingdom went through its own process of developing standardised women's clothing sizes.

In 1951, approximately 5,000 British women were measured in a national survey led by James Kunick and the Clothing Industry Development Council. The results were published in 1957 as Women's Measurements and Sizes. The purpose was similar to the American research: to provide the clothing industry with better information about the bodies of British women and create a more rational basis for sizing.

Then, in 1963, the British Standards Institution published BS 3666, Specification for Size Designation of Women's Wear. This introduced a standardised system for designating women's clothing sizes, and this is where an important distinction needs to be made.

There was — and is — no legal requirement for every clothing manufacturer to produce garments according to one universal set of measurements.

In fact, the UK Government explicitly confirmed in Parliament in 1994 that the use of BS 3666 was voluntary. That means the number on your clothing label was never a legally enforced universal measurement of your body. It was a designation within a standardised system that manufacturers could choose to use.

And manufacturers have always had other considerations: style, fabric, target audience, brand identity, fit, cost and, ultimately, what they believe their customers will buy.

So even the idea of a “standard” size is more complicated than it first appears.

Misleading Marketing

And this brings us to one of the most fascinating developments in clothing sizing: vanity sizing.This is the practice of assigning a smaller numerical size label to a garment than its physical measurements might historically have suggested.

This isn't simply an internet myth. Researchers have studied the psychological effects of clothing-size labels and found that the number attached to a garment can influence how consumers feel about themselves. A smaller number can create a more positive perception of oneself. A larger number can do the opposite.

Think about that for a moment.

Your body hasn't changed. The garment hasn't changed. Only the label has changed, and yet the number can affect how you feel when you look in the mirror.

This is where clothing sizing stops being simply an engineering problem and becomes a cultural one.

We don't treat clothing sizes as neutral numbers. We attach meaning to them. We attach emotion to them. We attach ideas about success, attractiveness, health and even our worth to them, yet the number itself can be remarkably arbitrary.

This is perhaps one of the biggest misconceptions about clothing. We talk about “standard sizing” as though there is one universal standard that every manufacturer follows. There isn't. Standards exist, but their adoption and implementation have varied between countries and over time.

In the United States, voluntary apparel sizing standards developed by the National Bureau of Standards were eventually withdrawn in 1983, with ASTM subsequently taking responsibility for apparel sizing standards.

In Britain, BS 3666 existed — but its use was voluntary.

Manufacturers have always had the ability to develop their own sizing systems and blocks, which means that you can walk into one shop and be a size 12, walk into another and be a size 14, and try on a size 16 somewhere else.

Your body hasn't changed – just the number has. That and how you may feel about yourself.

Technological Advances

By the beginning of the 21st century, it was becoming increasingly obvious that the old data needed updating. The British survey was more than 50 years old. The population had changed. Technology had changed, and 3D body scanning had made the possibility of conducting a much larger and more detailed sizing survey a reality. This was a huge technological leap.

The SizeUK project began in 2001 and became the UK's first national sizing survey using 3D scanning technology. More than 11,000 adults, of all genders, aged 18–85 were measured across the country.

The results demonstrated just how much the population had changed since the earlier surveys. The data was much richer, providing information about body measurements and proportions on a scale that had never previously been possible in the UK. However, there was still a fundamental problem.

The data still didn't automatically get adopted by the industry or become a universal system.

Manufacturers still had to decide how that data should be translated into sizes and what measurements each size should represent. So even with better data, we still don't have one universal system.

Sewing your own clothes is surely the answer?

You might think that if you make your own clothes, you've escaped the problem. You haven't.

Commercial sewing patterns have their own sizing systems, their own measurements and their own assumptions about body proportions, much like the commercial ready-to-wear industry. These assumptions can be just as problematic.

This is why I spend so much time with my students trying to work out why a pattern doesn't fit, and it is why, over the last 18 months, I've been trying to find a simpler way of teaching people how to deal with it. I've experimented with different fitting methods. I've looked at pattern alterations, fitting adjustments and blocks. I've learned from people who have been doing this for decades.

When I started looking for answers, I thought I might have stumbled across a problem nobody else had noticed. Why isn’t anybody talking about this? Instead, I discovered an entire community of people who have been trying to solve it for years.

People like Pati Palmer, who has spent decades teaching pattern fitting and challenging the idea that a commercial pattern should simply be accepted as the correct shape for every body.

If you don’t know Pati Palmer — deep dive! She is a goddess.

There are countless other teachers, researchers and pattern cutters doing similar work in different ways. They've developed methods, systems and techniques, and have helped thousands of people make clothes that fit.

What I'm trying to understand is what all this knowledge means for the ordinary person sitting at a sewing machine with a commercial pattern in front of them.

Because somewhere along the way, fitting has become unnecessarily complicated.

I think it can be made much simpler.

Maybe we're asking the wrong question. Perhaps the biggest problem is the question we've been taught to ask:

“What size am I?”

We've been encouraged to believe that there is a correct answer — that somewhere there is a number that accurately represents our body, but there isn't, not really.

There may be a size that is the closest starting point for a particular pattern, a size that works for a particular brand, or a size that fits one part of your body while being completely wrong for another. But none of those numbers are ‘you’. You are not a size 10, a size 16 or a size 22. You are a three-dimensional human being with your own individual proportions, and no single number can accurately describe you.

Perhaps, then, we should have been asking a different question all along:

“What shape am I?”

And, more importantly:

“How can I make the clothes fit the body I actually have?”

That's really what I want Why Nothing Fits to be about.

It's about the history behind the numbers on our clothing labels, the research that created the systems we still use today and the limitations of that research. It's about educating people about our very limiting ready-to-wear clothing, commercial sewing patterns, blocks, body measurements and fitting. It's about the people who have been challenging these systems for decades.

But mostly it's about finding a simpler way for ordinary people to understand fitting without being made to feel that their body is the problem, because after spending years helping women make clothes fit, I've become increasingly convinced of one thing:

There is nothing wrong with your body - clothes were never designed to fit you in the first place.

With Love,

Laura Rae