Vanity sizing and why online shopping keeps failing you

Order the same nominal size from four different brands and four different garments arrive. This is not carelessness. It is a decision, taken deliberately, and it has a name: vanity sizing the slow relabelling of larger garments with smaller numbers, because a customer who fits into a smaller number feels better about the purchase.

The number drifted

Clothing sizes began as a rough statistical summary of a population, taken decades ago from survey data that was never especially representative. Since then the labels have moved and the bodies have not moved with them in any orderly way. A garment sold today under one size label may be several centimetres wider in the waist than the same label from the same brand twenty years ago. There is no external standard forcing consistency, and none of it is illegal, or even hidden. It simply is not information.

The label tells you what the brand wants you to feel. The measurement tells you whether it fits.

What this costs

The visible cost is returns. Fit is consistently the leading reason clothing goes back, and every return is a courier journey, a repackaging, and often a garment that never reaches another customer. The invisible cost is quieter and larger: the pieces you keep because returning them is a chore, wear once, and resent thereafter.

The workaround that actually works

Most brands publish a garment measurement table somewhere behind the size selector chest, waist, hip, inseam, in centimetres. It is the most useful thing on the page and the least read. If you know your own measurements, that table stops being noise and becomes an answer. You are no longer asking whether you are a 12. You are asking whether 96 centimetres across the chest is what you want.

This is the small, unglamorous reason MyLooke starts with a body scan rather than a style quiz. Taste is worth learning. But taste applied to a garment that does not fit is decoration on a mistake.