Vanity sizing

[Bruisername]

is it worse?

I’ve lost a bit of weight recently and back to my early 20s weight and more or less shape - 25 years on. Back then I was a 12/14

now I’m finding the sizing is haywire. In a lot of shops I’m a large but others a small for tops and bottoms 10/12 seem to fit

but today I had the weirdest which was a wool coat from John Lewis and the one that fitted was an 8. I’ve never been an 8 and in other brands I definitely wouldn’t have been

i look at my 15yo and she is a 4/6 and think in old money she’s an 8/10 but is it healthy to have the little numbers? Do teenagers aspire to be size 0 like they did in my teenage years?

and it makes ordering online hard because what do I pick size wise!

anyway rant over but I’d be interested to know if people think this has become more a thing and sizing is even less consistent across brands than even just 5 years ago

maybe, like you, I’m just an irritable person?

Yes! The number doesn’t matter, except in the sense that different clothes shops have different versions of a size 12 or a size 18 or whatever. If that was standardised then we’d all know what to lift off the rail. I do think the term ‘vanity sizing’ is often used in a very supercilious way to imply that today’s fat, deluded bastards (I don’t think this btw) need to be made to feel ashamed. ‘That size 10 you’re wearing would have been a size 14 back in the day.’ I’m not saying that was the intention of this thread, but I do wonder if there needs to be another way to refer to the changes to clothing sizes without using that awful expression ‘vanity sizing.’ I think women, particularly young women and girls, spend enough time angsting over their bodies.

Irregular sizing maybe. Agree the phrase isn’t a good one

In the 90s, I was pretty reliably a small size 12 everywhere, but my pride and joy charity shop leather jacket (from the 70s) was a 16. Old dress patterns are interesting for comparison too

The only issue with waist sizing is it doesn’t work for hourglasses/pears. I’m somewhere between and hourglass and a pear - 5’11” with a 27 inch waist but I have broad hips and shoulders.

a 27” waist is usually a size 8, but the bust and hip measurements are then too small for me. If I go by my hip measurements, I’m in a 12, which is too big everywhere else!

I've noticed this with bras too. I normally wear a 36 band and I found a couple of size 38 bras in the back of a drawer. One i could get on but DH needed to hook it up for me. The other one I will need to get a bra extender to be able to wear it.

For some reason the fact that people who used to be a 36C in bras are now all 30F is not considered vanity sizing by Mumsnet. That's just because everyone was wearing the wrong size before. The psychology is fascinating!

But the bra one is a proper measurement isn’t it?

No it doesn't seem to be! Like jeans I guess which are also meant to just be a measurement but are all over the place.

I don’t know - I’ve just been to John Lewis and was measured and all the bras I bought/tried from different brands fitted in that size. Although only certain styles - I think you need a different style for different shape boobs and maybe if you go for the wrong style you end up with a different size

https://www.elilausa.com/artofbrafitting/2024/12/6/tight-bras-vanity-sizing-and-the-evolution-of-bra-fitting-time-to-rethink-the-approach

This is an interesting article about it.

That article claims a 38B from the 90s would now be labelled a 34F. Which (like the clothes sizes) is fine, things change. I just think it's interesting to unpack why size 8 being for a bigger body now makes people angry but a 34F being for a wider back and smaller breasts didn't seem to attract the same ire.

This tracks with my experience btw, I was a 36C as a teenager and wear a 34G now although my back is definitely not smaller.

Just editing to add that you (OP) don't seem angry about it but others certainly are!

A number of UK retailers undertook a sizing survey in the late 1990s which was meant to address the fact that people’s shapes were changing. https://www.size.org/
For me, the most noticeable outcome of this was that the waist of garments in relation to the hips got bigger. Most of the retailers that participated in the survey are long gone, and many clothing retailers selling in the UK today are using different (European, US, Asian etc.) sizing models, possibly based on data from their country of origin.

That is interesting. When I was size 8-10 in the 80s & 90s I had a 24 inch waist. Size 8 was not a 27 inch waist back then, so that had definitely changed.

I remember around 1997 buying and wearing a pair of vintage 1970s velvet flares from a charity shop that had a size 14 label on them. At the time I would have been a 12, maybe a 10 on a good day, definitely not a 14. Around the same time I bought a gypsy style top from New Look that was a size 16 and absolutely tiny, I always wondered if it was mislabelled.

Nowadays I'm probably a similar size to what I would have been in the 90s and a fairly consistent size 8 in the shops, occasionally a 10. But if I was going to sew clothes from a pattern, I'd be cutting for a size 12 (which would be a 26.5" waist in Vogue sizing).

I don't know if it's all vanity sizing but it is all over the place and really needs standardising.

Bras are actually the one thing I haven't changed size in, I've always been a 30f/32e since my teens (I'm 46 now)

I dropped from a 32 to a 28 following a visit to Bravissimo for a fitting. 28 is my actual chest measurement.

I bought a top a couple of weeks ago and L was a 10, XL was a 12. I think you have to look at the specific measurements in the size guide to be sure.

@HeadNorthYes, I wasn’t an 8 as a teenager in the late 90s!

Well, the cup size would be the same, I think, it's the back size of the 30F that's smaller. A 30F is overall smaller (narrower back) than a 36c - your actual boobs are the same size but there's less difference between your boobs and your rib cage. If you changed from 36C to 30F it would either mean you'd been wearing too loose a band, or you'd lost weight but it had come off your rib cage and back rather than your breasts.

I was measured as a 36B (marks) and always found bras uncomfy. Went to rigby and pellet and they measured me as a 32e and my bras were comfy! They did say that they commonly saw people who were measured wrong

Definitely hit and miss these days. Hope for the best .Sizing is crazy.

Just buy what size fits you and what you feel comfortable in

I think the most annoying is having to take multiple sizes to the changing room. I don’t have a good enough eye to know which one!

My mums always bringing me clothes from my teens that she comes across as they are renovating. The amount of times I've winced at some size 12 labels, been the same height and weight since I was 14, and wear a 4/6/8 now depending on the shop.

Dd was away shopping today, got cosy jammies in primark . A size 8-10 is now marketed as a medium and they are absolutely massive on her, more a 12-14. It's absolutely ridiculous.

I am about 8 stone and 5'4 (51 kg/163cm) and can't find clothes to fit in some stores, they are all too big. Other shops like River Island do cater for my size. I don't think I am particularly small and see lots of women a lot smaller than me. There is definitely a loss of choice at the lower end.

And I don't want to wear children's clothes.