Article originally published at the Post-Dispatch Web site ( http://www.stltoday.com ).
Republished here with permission from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch
Copyrighted 2004 - St. Louis Post-Dispatch.
Survey sizes up Americans for the perfect fit
By Michael D. Sorkin Of the Post-Dispatch - 03/07/2004
Susan Morgan has been a traditional size 6. She's been that size since she was a freshman at Southwest High School more than 25 years ago. But when she shops, she still has to rummage through rack after rack of clothing to find a size that actually fits. Depending on the brand and the store, she laments, "I'm either a 2, a 4, a 6, an 8 or a 10." Morgan may benefit from a major national survey that for the first time in more than 60 years has measured Americans with the aim of helping consumers find clothing, cars, airline seats and other products that are the right shape for today's bodies.
It's called the National Sizing Survey. A technology research company used a big, closet-sized, white light-emitting scanner to take three-dimensional measurements of 10,001 people at sites across the country. The first site was at the University of Missouri at Columbia , where a professor who teaches students about textiles and apparel technology played a key role in the just-completed study. It's not well known, but the United States does have national standards for clothing sizes. But the standards aren't legally binding, and clothing manufacturers are free to ignore them. Which explains why Morgan and many others have closets full of clothes that run the gamut in size labels. Today's clothing sizes are based partly upon measurements taken before World War II and some date to the Civil War. People then were shorter and smaller, and the population was less diverse than today's Americans.
Enter Jim Lovejoy and the folks at TC2 a technology firm in Cary , N.C. , that conducted the national survey dubbed SizeUSA. They developed a 3D scanner and special software that measures the body at 200 points. Some of their early findings:
People get bigger as they get older. Men and women grow 3-5 inches in the waist and 1-3 inches in the hips as they age from the 18-35 age group to the 36-65 group. Busts or chests grow larger, too, 2-3 inches in men and 4-6 inches in women.
Some 58 percent of women and 42 percent of men felt they were overweight.
Only 10 percent to 20 percent of Americans fit the so-called national standards.
Average body shapes have changed, morphing from the hourglass of the past to pear shape.
Lovejoy estimates that 60 percent of people today are pear-shaped, with hips bigger than their shoulders. Changing body shapes has led to something known in the clothing trade as "vanity-sizing." That's aimed at the shopper who has always worn a size 8 and doesn't want to graduate to a 10 or 12 as she gets older. Manufacturers accommodate her by resizing garments, sewing size 8 labels on what used to be larger-size clothing. U.S. laws require that garments disclose what they are made of and where they are made, but no law governs the size a manufacturer can put on clothing.
"My guess is this is pretty widespread," Lovejoy says of vanity sizing. "Especially in more expensive clothing. Women say, 'the higher the price, the smaller the size I wear.' Liz Claiborne admits to it, saying they do it because that's what their customers want."
Liz Claiborne is one of 31 sponsors that helped pay for the study. Other sponsors include Dillard's, J.C. Penney, Lands' End and the Army and Navy. Grants from the U.S. Commerce Department paid for about half of the $1 million cost. Another sponsor was the University of Missouri . In August 2002, signs appeared on the Columbia campus seeking volunteers willing to have their bodies measured.
They were offered $20 cash or $25 gift certificates at Dillard's or Target stores. Some 1,100 students, teachers and others answered the call. They were told to strip and change into bicycle shorts (and cotton bras for women), gifts given to each volunteer. One by one, they stepped into what looked like a big black box: a dark booth about 8 feet by 13.5 feet in size. That was the scanner. Sensors in front and behind the volunteer projected patterns of light on each person. In less than a minute, the subject emerged, leaving behind a three-dimensional image.
The university has since purchased one of the new scanners - one of only about a dozen in use - at a cost of $45,000. A spokesman says the university paid $30,000 and an anonymous donor paid $15,000. MU says the scanner will be used in research. After the university's tests, another 9,000 volunteers were scanned at a dozen other sites across the country. Lovejoy's group has since broken down the body information by gender, six age ranges and four ethnic groups, as well as by income, education, lifestyle and shopping preferences.
That's to make it useful to sell; the 134-page study is now available to anyone willing to pay $20,000.
"We now can get an idea of what the average-sized man or woman is for this country," says Karla Simmons, an assistant professor of apparel and textiles, who was in charge of the scanning at MU. Simmons is a size 4, whose closet also is filled with size 2s and 6s. She says she's always been interested in what makes clothing tick, from her childhood in south Alabama where her grandmother taught sewing in a bra factory. Simmons says results of the body scans will be used by medical, auto and airline companies, the military, and just about anyone else with a product that deals with human comfort.
The sizing survey is being eagerly read by catalog and online clothing companies, which work hard to make sizes as predictable as possible to avoid costly returns. "Everybody is still digesting it," Lands' End spokesman Chris Mordi said of the survey.
Sizing also is important for brick and mortar retailers. But they have an advantage over online companies:
"We know when someone comes in whether they're a pear, an apple or a greenbean," says Carla Felumb, co-owner of Mister Guy stores in Ladue and Frontenac. "We know which jean line is going to fit."
Clothing salespeople also know about the customer who won't buy anything except, for example, a 4 - even when it's the size 8 or 10 that fits perfectly. "Numbers do mean things to people - like our age," Felumb says. To such shoppers, she advises: "This is an 8, and I know you're a 6, but it's from Italy and it runs really small. And since they know that going in, they're OK with it."
That still leaves people like Morgan, the woman who has to search for her clothes on rack sizes ranging from 2 to a 10. She's asked her family to stop giving her clothing as gifts. "Women's sizes are not consistent enough to let other people shop for you," she explains, "unless I know what store they're going to or what brand they're going to buy."
For more information about the National Sizing Survey, go to http://www.sizeusa.com
Reporter Michael D. Sorkin
E-mail: msorkin@post-dispatch.com
Phone: 314-340-8347
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