I was idly listening to a report on the telly the other day that dropped the throw away line, “vanity sizing issues are a barrier to internet clothes shopping”. That sentence jumped out at me, in the way that you can not listen to a colleagues conversation at work but hear the word “boobs” when they say it like they’ve shouted in your ear, rather than said it to someone 10ft away.
As a (reforming) fat bloke, the idea that clothe manufacturers can and are pissing about with sizings to make people feel a bit better- a sort of squeak, I now fit into a size 14, not a 16! moment– makes me a bit grumpy. I have enough trouble as a bloke getting things to fit. My current suit jacket is a 42inch chest but when I tried one on in M&S recently, a 46inch long sleeved affair made me look like a cross between Mr Bean and Bob Hoskins. I’m 6ft 4. We are an increasingly obese nation, people I met tend to fit into one of two categories, overweight or thin. The thins are an endangered species. I’ve blogged about my attempts to shift the weight equivalent of an 11 year old, so I’m not pointing at other people, I’m talking about us.
Anyway I digress. A bastion of gadgetry, the website Pocket-Lint does a website of the day feature. Since I can pretty much guarantee that 99% of the people reading this probably don’t read Pocket-Lint, I thought I would share their site of the day for today. It’s called What Size Am I? You enter your bust, waist and hip measurements and it tells you what size clothing from loads of popular stores will actually fit you. Stores are too numerous to list but do include; ASOS, Oasis, Topshop, Next, Reiss, Warehouse and Zara.
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| It’s easy to use. Even for girls |
I’ll say upfront I’ve not used the site, well I am a bloke, but the accompanying blog post talks through the logic of how the site works and it seems sensible. Heck, anyone who says that Topshop is aimed at the “fashionable midget” end of the market, gets my seal of approval.