I used to be one of those frustrated women screaming and shouting from a change room where I had tried on five different garments in the same size from the same store, only to find that just two of them actually fit me.
How can that be?, I’d bemoan. If men can have standardised clothes sizing, why can’t we?
A little background on attempts at standardised sizing in Australia for you before I get into the whys and and wherefores of where I now stand on the concept of standardised sizing …
According the Consumers Federation of Australia, “the Australian Standard Size Coding Scheme for women’s clothing was scrapped in 2009, leaving designers and manufacturers to develop their own sizing charts based on consumer feedback”.
You might see manufacturers developing their own sizing charts as a negative and I get that. At one end of the scale we have vanity sizing where garments are graded larger, supposedly making you feel better because you’re wearing clothes with a smaller number on the tag. Conversely there are stores many of us never step into because the garments are graded so small, the large size looks like something a pre-pubescent girl might wear. Neither situations are great.
The thing is, until I started designing clothes for women and sampling and photographing them on dozens of different women of different shapes and sizes, I only saw the negative in a brand developing their own individual size chart. With Styling You The Label (I closed the label in 2025), the starting point for our pattern grading was my own body shape and size. We’d size up and down from my size and shape, working closely on the shape of our garments with so many other women and listening to feedback from our engaged customer base. I saw this only as a positive. I was able to design and create garments that were cut for curves in sizes 6-20. For the first time in a long time, women would tell us how how excited they were that they found garments that actually fitted them.
They weren’t talking just about the size.
They loved that the shape worked for, not against, their body.
I was reminded of the importance of a garment’s shape in the standardised sizing debate over the past few months as I tried on more than 50 pairs of jeans as part of my 2026 Jeans Series. I also featured 11 other women in their favourite jeans. The aim of this annual series is to nudge you to try on lots of jeans to find your perfect pair because it can be so tricky understanding your individual shape and matching that to a jeans silhouette that works for you. You can play catch up on this series by clicking the image below if you missed it.
And in the post below I wrote for Mamamia, I’m share the eight pairs of jeans I bought this season. I’m wearing three different three different sizes across the eight pairs. I don’t care about the number on the label; I care about how the jeans work with my shape.
Women are not one standard shape and that’s what makes it impossible to have a universal standardised size chart that is actually useful.
Paid subscribers keep reading for what is useful:
Why jeans and pants in general are easy to design and size for men but super complex for women
How to get really clear in a non-derogatory way about your own body so you can successfully shop jeans and pants to suit your shape
The in-store solutions to finding jeans and pants to suit your shape
The online solutions to finding jeans and pants to your shape
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