Sizing of clothes for women
Clothing sizing. Has the world gone mad?
It’s not you. It’s the universe. Although sizing is instituted to help identify a body size range, it’s underwhelmingly inaccurate to describe how the garment will fit.
Let’s look at sizing. The science of making a garment is a blend of standardizing across all garment types, yet garments have different qualities making them fit not standard.
Take pants.
Two common ways to purchase pants are numbered: Size 0, 2, 4, 6, 8… or lettered, xs, s, m, l, xl…
If the size is lettered - medium, for example, then it should be able to accommodate 2 sizes, such as size 8 and size 10.
Let’s use me to look closer at the sizing, and inherent inaccuracies. I’m a small / medium or about a 6 or 8. Ideally, my pants would be a 6 butt/thighs and an 8 in the waist. I’m more pear shaped. I typically purchase medium pants.
Glow Workwear. We initially went with numbered sizing to fit more accurately. We switched to lettered sizing due to the amount of stretch in our squeeze pants fabric. ( both the cool squeeze and squeeze. those are two different fabrics but both chosen for their durability + stretch)
You know what is fantastic about bodies? Hips/thighs ratio to waist can go the other way too. We have models and friends that try on our squeeze pants (to help us develop the fit) that have 8/10 thights/butt/booty and a size 6/4 in the waist.
There are also more “true to size” people. The lingo “true to size” means these people are 6 or 8 or 10 in the waist and thigh/butt/booty.
How did we design Glow Workwear? The waistband of traditional workwear was the first to go. As I am not “true to size” I wanted to search out and replicate the performance of my recreation pieces, for my workwear clothes. We wanted a look that said professional and workwear and “I’m here to do business”, combined with the performance and enjoyment the right fabric can bring.
We gave the squeeze pants and cool squeeze pants a 2.5 inch waistband that has a range of three inches from relaxed to extended. The elastic waistband helps us bridge size ranges across body types. It can hug or extend to keep the pants in place while feeling comfortable.
The fabric is a 4 way stretch double weave. The double weave means that the inside of the fabric and the outside of the fabric have two different weaves. The inside is softer and has a feel of brushed material. The outside is flater so that it is more resistant to abrasion.
The Squeeze pant double weave fabric
The Cool Squeeze pant double weave fabric
So what about sizing.
Body shapes are a real thing. Some size 8’s will fit and some will not depending on the body shape the garment was designed to best suit. But wait, not all is lost.
We can design with the idea in mind that bodies carry muscle and fat (normal!) to various amounts in various places on the body, most likely between the butt/belly and thighs.
We are not claiming to design for every body type (but that would be cool! #goals) we do work to use design and fabric sourcing so that more body types within the size range can fit into our workwear and have a solid workday.
An aside about denim. Workwear denim is traditionally less stretchy and has less forgiveness to fit various size ranges. For this reason it is difficult to make it super functional across body shape ranges, yet denim so beloved!!! For this reason, for the squeeze and cool squeeze, we began our fabric search in the nylon / polyester / spandex section. I mean, would you make a hiking, running, kneeling, bending, all-day-on-the-go pant out of denim? It’s not the first fabric that comes to mind when I think of hiking. Yet, so many places and people feel denim has that uniform quality that they want to bring to their workday. Which we totally get and love. Let us know what you think about the The Straight Agency denim or our Nylon based work pants - the Squeeze and the Cool Squeeze.