Christmas being over now, we’ve finally finished all the Christmas things. Visiting all the family, distributing all the presents, and taking back to the shops everything that doesn’t fit.
That latter category seems to be getting bigger and bigger now; with more and more online shopping, it includes more and more things that we’ve bought for ourselves and not just things from other people.
I wouldn’t mind so much, if maybe different shops and different companies could be maybe a little more consistent. You see, I know how big I am.* So I go online and I look at sizing charts, I buy things that apparently match my body, and find that they don’t fit. At all. Fair enough. So I go to my wardrobe, and I find something from the same manufacturer, roughly the same type of clothing, that fits me. I note down its measurements. I buy that size. And, when it arrives,** does it fit? No, of course not. Nowhere near. How stupid of me to expect that it would.
Now, I know consistancy can be tricky to get in mass manufacturing: for one thing, I’ve been told before that no item of clothing will be exactly the same size as something else from the same batch, because of the way stacks of fabric are cut. And I’m used to the fact that different shops size things slightly differently, so Expensive Middle-Class Suits R Us will make slightly larger clothes that make you feel that little bit happier when you slip into a size 10, when Stylish Cheap Teenage Fashions Inc are a bit stingier with their stuff and will make you buy a size 16 for pocket-money prices. Even so, I’d expect different things from the same shop to be at least vaguely comparable. I don’t expect two garments to be six inches different on the label,*** but the same physical size. Grrr.
* About this tall, that wide, and so round around the middle.
** and “waiting in for delivery men who then don’t bother to ring the doorbell” is a whole another rant for another day.
*** literally, six inches. I wonder if anyone does make clothes out of literal stuff any more, or if you can even buy it.
