Hasta La Ideas

“One size fits all” is the challenge of a furniture designer, up to a point. You design a chair or sofa that a 95th-percentile anthropomorphic shape will fit into, and then everyone that encounters that piece, from leg-dangling five-year-olds to 300 pound hulks, tries to make their body fit into it comfortably.

Fashion designers have a more daunting task, as they have to produce the same garment in a variety of sizes. But even after they pull that off, a new problem emerges, one that any female clothing shopper can tell you about: There’s no standardization of female sizes in the clothing industry. According to this article in the Times, “Take a woman with a 27-inch waist. In Marc Jacobs’s high-end line, she is between an 8 and a 10. At Chico’s, she is a triple 0.” Even the Gap and Banana Republic, both part of the same company, have different sizes between them. Then there is the problem of “vanity sizing,” whereby companies arbitrarily reduce the number sizes so women don’t feel fat.

One emerging solution to this problem is the MyBestFit body scanner, a piece of technological overkill that nevertheless seems necessary because of the ridiculous lack of standardization.

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