The Grand Social recently attended a roundtable discussion for fashion bloggers staged to spark debate around the highly contentious issue of clothing sizes in Australia. Up for discussion was the issue of widespread clothing irregularities across labels in Australia, the changing shape of Australian women and the need for a new national sizing survey. The discussion was hosted by Australian Consumer magazine CHOICE and attended by Melissa Hoyer, Sassy Bella's Helen Lee, freelance writer Natalie Smith and chaired by Rag Trader editor Tracey Porter (Frockwriter's Patty Huttington was also to attend but sent her apologies).

CHOICE staged a shadow shop exercise around Sydney's Pitt St Mall, where reporter Kate Browne shopped for a simple black skirt across five major Australian labels resulting in Kate finding herself to range from a size 10 to a size 14 depending on the label. The most recent sizing survey in Australia was way back in 1975 and evidence of heavier population and examples such as above demonstrate the need for a new for new data to be collected. The government has recently announced plans in the budget to seek advice from the National Measurement Institute on the costs and benefits of forming a voluntary industry standard.

Designers that The Grand Social spoke with on the issue were all very welcoming of the idea of a new national sizing survey and although they saw the enforcing of a standardised sizing scheme as problematic they were in consensus that the information would be beneficial for their business, in particular with regard to online sales.

Also raised at the roundtable was the existence of vanity sizing within larger mainstream clothing labels compared to relatively smaller sizing existing within high-end Australian labels and the lack of larger sizes in our boutique labels. We asked several designers whether they have ever considered offering size 14s in their collections and the three labels we spoke with said they had all looked into it at some stage but upon offering it to their retailers they had not had enough interest to justify it financially against the production costs of grading to another size.

We would love to hear your opinions on the issue of sizing in Australia just log in to your GS account and leave your comments below. As an etailer this is a particularly pertinent one for us so we would love to hear your thoughts!

View the full report at the CHOICE website

Natalie Smith's blog So Much To Tell You
Helen Lee's blog Sassy Bella
Melissa Hoyer's blog Melissa Hoyer
Tracey Porter editor of Rag Trader

Posted by jenna ...

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