To say vanity sizes should be rolled back?

So you can't fit into a 12 and your conclusion is that the dress must actually be a 6. I think you may be being optimistic about the extent to which the sizes have changed sorry 😁

Any chance you'd be up for measuring the garment width? It may be mislabelled.

My SIL is exactly the same weight now as she was as a student back in the late 1980s. Then, she took a size 12. Today, she takes a size 6.
No wonder we have a fucking obesity crisis in this country when people who are actually clinically obese are able to wear a size 14.

The only annoying thing is lack of consistency, but that just means shops that aren’t consistent across their range (eg New Look) I don’t order online from them. Given more woman shop online now, it does seem that it would be useful to have an agreed sizing what a size 10 means waist, hips, chest wise etc.

one that really annoys me is when shops don’t stick to their own advertised sizing, like when M&S decided to make everything longer, so their short leg was now the length of their old regular leg. In itself not a disaster, but no one updated the website size guide so I merrily ordered the short leg thinking I was getting a particular inside leg length and I wasn’t. Believe it hit their sales enough that they’ve abandoned the new sizing. I still would prefer to try on than faff about ordering trousers from them to be certain, which means I haven’t bought from them when buying summer work clothes this year as I needed to shop on line.

I have a lovely original Laura Ashley dress which I bought years ago from ebay. The label says it's a 12. I'm an 8 to 10. I'd say it's a small 6.

just pick 2-3 sizes in the clothes you like and try them on

Which is fine if you're in the shop and they have the sizes.

Not fine if you're ordering online, look carefully at the size charts, do all the quizzes, order the size they suggest and it doesn't fit.

Or you order 2-3 sizes and they get all sniffy with you 'because you return too many items'.

I can remember being a teeny tiny 8 stone when I was in my early 20's, was 5'6" and did about 13 exercise classes a week. I was a size 12, I could never get into a 10. I suspect these days it would be a size 6 or 8.

I’m a 10-12!

@Sunsetcocktail well Id buy them from the teen range and save myself some VAT, Next jeans and vests etc are pretty much the same style but vastly different prices. Obviously work wear is about trickier and you are likely to look like you are off to school.

Oh c’mon. Surely people can see that vanity sizing sucks if you actually are a small framed woman. If a size 6 is just too big in most high street stores where are you meant to buy affordable clothes from?

I don't really care about what size is on the label, sizes are of course arbitrary on who first thought them up. What I do want is consistent sizing though between styles and stores and inches seem the simplest answer.

I'm also a size 16 but shorter than you. I haven't worn a small anything since I was pre-teen.

If a size small Uniqlo cardigan was too big for you, that would mean that it was supposed to be a loose fit, it's not proof that all women's clothing is so enormous that slim women are at risk of not being able to find clothes to wear.

I hate all the 'teeny tiny' sneering on here. People are all different shapes and and sizes so of course there are going to be people who are small and slim.

Nobody can do anything about their height or natural weight.

We’re not just broader/fatter, we’re also taller. Sizes are pretty much meaningless now, so just pick 2-3 sizes in the clothes you like and try them on. If you want everything to be the same size then they all need to be made in the same factories in the UK, and it’s too expensive to do that here now.

This vintage clothing size chart shows 28 inch which today is 10, is a 12

https://www.allaboutaudrey.co.uk/pages/size-guide-conversion-chart

In old money would this model be a size 12?

A lot of it now is because fashions have changed, millennial fashion was very tight fitting, skinny jeans etc whereas now everything is supposed to look super loose, baggy, wide. So you're supposed to buy a 12 and it look huge on you, not buy a 12 and it looks tighter than it should because you're a 16.

It matters if you're buying online and end up with something far too big or small

Perhaps they should dispense with numbers altogether and just have a range with labels that go from "Wow! You're so slim and gorgeous, everyone is sooo jealous" to "Don't delude yourself fatty" so everyone would know exactly where they stood.

In the 1970s a size 10 waist was 24 inches which was generous on teenage me and my friends. Now a 10 starts at 30.5 inches up to 32 inches. And that’s before shops start adding their own vanity premium.

This is one area where I think it would be really helpful to have a standard that all manufacturers had to keep to. Vanity sizing does people no good in helping them kid themselves they’re smaller/thinner than they are.

I'm 5'11 and 95kg. Size 16 normally.

I bought a cardigan in Uniqlo the other day, its quite boxy, on the loose size. It's a size S. Thought about getting a more fitted one in XS.

Not sure what the bloody hell slim women are supposed to do here! I think they have a right to be concerned, without all the clearly jealousy-fuelled venom directed at them on here.

"i think vanity sizing isn’t great because people DO judge their health/weight by what size they wear and it’s easy to convince yourself that you’re still a size 12 so you can’t really be much different when in fact you’re tipped into an unhealthy weight range (realize plenty of people could be normal BMI as a 12, it puts me well into overweight)."

The reverse of this - people thinking they are incredibly overweight because they don't fit into a specific size. Like me as a teenager thinking I was horribly fat because I didn't know that clothes patterns/manufacturers assume you are a B-cup regardless of how many sizes you go up, and thinking the problem was my body and not the button-up shirt. Or me as an adult being underweight and not noticing because my actual pelvis didn't fit into anything smaller than a 14.

I agree. Although I don't care so much about vanity sizing as such it's just that it should be consistent across the board. Couldn't give a shit if I'm an 8 or an 18 just be consistent. During lockdown I bought 3 pairs of New Look jeans, all the same style just in 3 different shades all allegedly size 10 yet they were all different sizes despite being labelled Size 10!

Yes you are skinny in my book

Sizes are bigger now just to reflect that every generation is bigger than the last. Not necessarily fatter but taller, broader stronger. There will always be outliers but this is mostly true. My grandmother was thought of as a giant in school. She always said how she hated being tall. She was 5ft 6. Fast forward to my daughter and she was called titch in school as at 5ft 8 she was the smallest of all her friends. None of my dds friends are overweight but they are definitely taller and broader than I or my friends were when we were at school. Sizing needs to reflect that. They work on averages. I do agree though that it's annoying when the sizes vary so much, they should be standardised. I've given up on Hush, their sizing is all over the place and you never know whether it will be too tight or big enough to fit 3 of you in!

Sizes from decades ago don’t mean anything to young women who weren’t around then though.
If shoe sizes had changed (which is also just an arbitrary number) would you think they should change them back because people might not realise that they have small/big feet by 20 years ago’s standards?