Wha'is the matter with clothes manufacturers these days?

I’ve been trying to find women’s long-sleeved shirts (cos I want a change from Primark men’s shirts!).

That’s all I want – plain, boring, long-sleeved women’s shirts that are long enough in the body so as not to come untucked when one bends forward (I thoroughly dislike that “air-gap” – are “ladies” supposed to do nothing except look pretty? They’re not meant to do anything that means they have to lean forward even a bit??)

I just found something (eventually!) on eBay (what’s the point of searching for “ladies’ long sleeved white shirts” when you get three pages of short-sleeved black t-shirts?) … so I looked at some of the shirts that were actually what I’d been looking for.

And then I noticed how they were sized. I quote:

size 8 - XS (30")
size 10 - S (32")
size 12 - M (34")
size 14 - L (36")
size 16 - XL (38")
and so on ….

I average around size 14 and I don’t feel particularly obese, thank you very much!

At least this is slightly better than a previous instance: I bought a basque for a fancy dress event: size 14. when it arrived, I tried it on and it fitted well.

Then I noticed the size label sewn into it … “XL”.

If I’d known that before I bought it, I wouldn’t have bought it, no matter how well it fitted – how dare some (probably male) git in an office somewhere arbitrarily decree that anyone my size is well on the way to obesity?

WTF are we coming to when a size 14 is considered “extra large”?

And you wonder why so many women and girls have bad body images when they’re as good as told that if they’re not matchsticks they’re barrage balloons?

You wonder why so many women and girls are anorexic or on the way to anorexia when we’re told that a female who is properly woman-shaped is “extra large”, implying the incipient onset of clinical obesity?

Why don’t manufactures just put the actual size on the garment and leave out “small-to-gigantic” labels, with all the attendant hang-ups that they cause?

They’re only generalisations, anyway – one manufacture’s “medium” is another’s “huge”, so they’re no more than very vague descriptions.

I’ve had “medium” t-shirts that were large enough to get a second person in as well, and “large” t-shirts that I had to get on with a shoe-horn.

They don’t actually tell one the real size of the garment unless one knows what the manufacturer consider small, medium or large – they’re comparatives, but we’re not given the comparison to let us work out what ruler the manufacture is measuring with.

Even clothing sizes are relative: the UK, Europe and US all have different size labels for the same physical size.

So why don’t they just put the actual chest size – 34”, 36”, or whatever. Inches are inches, so it won’t matter which country one lives in; if one uses the imperial measuring system, one will know if a garment will fit or not.

Of course, if they put both inches and centimetres on garments, then us Imperialists could gradually get to know our metric sizes too!

But let’s cut this “extra large” bollocks. We don’t need it! any more than we need the “size 0” at the other end of the scale – the one that we’re all supposed to aspire to if we want to be real women! Even if it kills us, and it probably will.