Can children's clothing sizes be improved?

This blog is part of a series about The Essential Guide To Children's Clothing.

Any person that shops for children's clothing often becomes frustrated in their shopping experience. There appears to be a disconnect between what the retailer or brand are stating is one size and what the child actually fits. Why does this happen? Is there a better way?

It is true that age based size labels are sometimes inaccurate, or at least appear inaccurate. A child's body size and shape is influenced by a lot of different factors. Those factors include genetics, ethnicity, income demographic, diet, and nutrition. Children's clothing sizes vary because of this and other factors.

Manufacturers specialize on product type and a customer profile. This is true even in children's clothing. There is a size standard which exists for children's clothing, but manufacturers and designers will adapt or modify their product to fit their customer profile. This is not a bad thing. Children are individuals with their own unique characteristics. 

Many people complain that there needs to be a clear standard and by conforming to that standard we will solve sizing problems. Is it realistic to compel the industry to conform to a single size standard for children? By doing this, you will be guaranteed to never find clothing that fits all children at all times. There would always be a child that will not find clothing that fits if there is only one standard. Flexibility is needed in such a diverse marketplace. So while there is a general size standard that can be purchased, it may or may not be followed all that closely.

There are ways to make things easier for customers. Providing clear size charts and how to measure guides in the retail store and online can help customers select the right size. While it may be frustrating, customers have the ability to shop the market for alternate brands or sizes that fit their child. Variation is actually a good thing.

For this and more, see The Essential Guide to Children's Clothing Sizes.

Who manufactures a size 9 months for baby clothes?

I have been intensely working on a project that requires me to study measurement charts and grading charts for children's clothing. It is not the most exciting thing to analyze, I must admit. There has been one size that has been the most difficult to understand and that is the size 9 months for babies.

Traditionally, there never was a size 9 months. The infant size range was arranged:

3M - 6M - 12M - 18M - 24M - 36M

Over time that arrangement dropped the 36M, making the 12M the middle size for sampling and grading. At some point a NB (newborn) and 9M was added. I have not found the reasoning for the additional sizes or exactly when they were added. At least with the NB, it makes some common sense as it is clothing for newly born children. Babies very quickly move through these early infant sizes, so many times the clothes are simple t-shirts and bodysuits. Size 9M, from a measurement standpoint, appears to be a half-size. Something between the 6M and 12M. You could say the 9M should fit a 9 month old baby and perhaps that is the intent.

The problem comes with how to incorporate the size 9M into a normal infant size range offering. It throws off the middle size 12M in sampling and grading. With the addition of the 9M, the 9M becomes the middle size.

NB - 3M - 6M - 9M - 12M - 18M - 24M

No one samples in a size 9M. No one. In fact, it would make grading difficult to do so - just look at the traditional grading charts by Jack Handford.

And that left me wondering. How many brands actually produce a size 9M? While my quick survey is not scientific, it revealed some interesting points.

Manufacturers of sleepwear, t-shirts, bodysuits, or lounge wear, tend to produce only certain sizes and they tend to arrange them:

0-3M, 3-6M, 6-9M

Of course there are variations. Manufacturers of special occasion dresses tend to produce only a few sizes too.

12M - 18M - 24M

There are variations there too. When I worked for a brand that produced christening apparel, we produced all the sizes from NB - 24M. Size 9M was not one of our top selling sizes.

BabyGap does not produce size 9M for any of their styles. They stick to the traditional size range:

3M - 6M - 12M - 18M - 24M

But they arrange their sizes so it looks like they have their bases covered.

Up to 7lb (NB),  0-3M, 3-6M, 6M-12M, 12M-18M, 18M-24M

So what is the point of all this? When you are developing your children's clothing line, you do not need to produce every size. There is a great temptation to offer every style in every size. The reality is that if the big brands aren't doing it, neither do you. A lot depends on the style and your customer. Who do you hang with? Who is your competition? What sizes do they produce? Once you know the answers to those questions, you can focus your efforts.

What about the size 9M? Unless your customer requires that size, it is probably best to skip it or at least make it appear that it is included within a size label like 6M-12M. Some private label programs may require a size 9M. If that is the case, it is a simple matter to split the grade rule between a 6M and a 12M to add the size.

Size standardization for clothing

In academic circles there is the idea that we need one measurement and sizing standard to solve all our fitting problems. A top down approach with no allowance for variation. Customers often complain that manufacturers have no idea what they are doing because nothing ever fits. Manufacturers face an enormous challenge in trying to interpret size specifications while at the same time meeting the needs of their customers. The more I read about sizing the more chaotic it seems. At the end of the day there is more than one way to look at size standardization, and I think only one battle to fight.

One standard to rule them all

Yes, the idea that one standard can be established for everyone. By forcing compliance we will have peace on earth, and yes, our clothes will fit! Considering the variety of shapes and sizes in the United States alone, the idea is really a fantasy.

• One standard guarantees that some of the population will not have any clothes that fit. One could argue this situation exists today, so why not try one standard. With no allowance to adapt to fit the wide range of shapes and sizes, then outliers will never have clothes that fit.
• Our population is constantly changing. The most recent sizing study revealed that we are taller and weigh more than we did in the past. One standard would quickly become outdated.
• Sizing studies are very expensive and labor intensive. Studies are not done frequently, so manufacturers will always be behind what is happening in the real world.

Loosely conforming to a standard while yet adapting to meet a customer's need.

Even if one standard to rule them all is unrealistic, we still need a standard. ASTM and the latest Sizing USA study have provided us with a standard that any manufacturer can use (for a price, of course). These measurement and sizing specs can act as a guide, a place to start. As a manufacturer develops their customer profile, they can adapt these standards to meet the needs of their customer.

Over the years, it's important to compare your product against these standards. I've seen patterns and sizing drift from these standards naturally through errors. These errors are not intentional, they just happen and can easily pass from one style to the next. So a careful study and comparison can bring things back. This includes measuring fit models and comparing them against the standard and analyzing customer returns due to fit issues. 

In-house size standardization

Once a sizing standard is established for a brand, it is important to adhere to that standard during product development. As an example, all new pants styles have the same finished length and waist sizes as specified. Variations in fit can come from multiple sources due to fabric variations (or problems), construction issues (taking too big/small a seam allowance, cutting errors), or variations in a pattern. You have to be careful not to draft a pattern from scratch every time. Pattern makers in the industry will use the patterns from an already proven style to develop the new style. This practice ensures consistent fit across styles. A quality control process through each step of development and production is necessary to find problems before they become big ones.

A few words on vanity sizing

Vanity sizing implies that a manufacturer wilfully chooses to ignore a size standard and relabel a size smaller than it actually is. I do not believe there is a vast conspiracy to do this intentionally. Instead I think manufacturers are trying to meet the needs of their customers while trying to conform to a standard.

*This blog entry was inspired from my reading in the book Sizing in Clothing and more specifically the article Sizing Standardization by K. L. LaBat. I made very few notes on this article and don't remember much of what I read. I did make a note that LaBat tried to prove the existence of vanity sizing by studying children's age-based sizing. I thought the argument was rather weak.

The history of standardized sizes for clothing

Do you ever wonder how people came up with the idea of sizing clothes? The creation of sizes allowed for the mass production of ready-to-wear garments. It was not created at a meeting of industry professionals, but evolved over time. Great leaps in sizing occurred because of war - somebody had to quickly and efficiently outfit an army.

Winifred Aldrich traces the development of sizes and ready to wear in her article History of Sizing and Ready-to-Wear Garments found in the Sizing in Clothing book*. Aldrich is a British pattern maker, designer, and researcher. I own two of her pattern drafting manuals and consider them among the best drafting manuals available (link in the sidebar to the left for the children's drafting manual). She knows her stuff, and she presents it well.

The understanding of body proportions began slowly with tailors producing clothing for men. They used strips of paper to measure the body and transfer the measurements to cloth. In time tailors devised tape measures and drafting systems. A size was not the beginning of the drafting job, rather the completed garment represented the size of the customer. As the industrial revolution progressed, tailors began to teach and sell their drafting systems. This included some already drafted patterns, sometimes in more than one size.

The concept was revolutionary and men began to be able to purchase their clothing ready made. Women, on the other hand, still had most of their clothing custom made into the early 20th century. There were attempts at creating patterns for women with named sizes, but it still required customization. There was a lack of knowledge of women's body measurements most likely because of the Victorian ideals of the time.

It is important to understand that our understanding of body measurements and proportions were not formalized until the 1940's. Ruth O'Brien, an employee of the U.S. Department of Home Economics and the Department of Agriculture, was commissioned to conduct a body measurement study of the American population. The purpose was to create a set of size standards based on reliable data that the apparel industry could use. The work involved in this study was enormous and revolutionary. O'Brien and her department created a measurement procedure that is still in existence today (only to be superseded by 3D body scanning). The data from these studies have been study and analyzed around the world.

To put this in perspective, it wasn't until the 1940s that we could finally see and understand human proportions with any clarity. It's easy to pan this early work as outdated and wrong but the 1940's was not that long ago. We still have so much to learn and understand.

A fun little factoid. Grading using the shifting or slide method, a common method still used today, can be traced back to 1908.

Aldrich's article goes into much more depth about the history of sizing. She includes pictures of early patterns and sizing systems. It is well worth a read if you can get a copy of it. This article is a combination and expansion of two previously written articles found in the journal Textile History.

*As I review individual articles from the Sizing in clothing book, I will not give a detailed discussion of each article. Rather, I will summarize and highlight a few key points along with my own thoughts on the subject.