Standardisation of cloth sizes: Can India be made to measure?

Researchers determined a few years ago that had Marilyn Monroe been alive today, her dress size would have been anything between 4 and 00, though by the norms of her time, she was size 12. It sounds like the curvaceous late Hollywood star’s stature reduced as time went by, but in reality, it was US dress sizes that shrivelled, leading to confusing double zero tags these days.

In fact, a size 6 of the diva’s era would find it hard to fit in today, quite literally. Indian women have rarely needed to see how they measure up thanks to the size agnostic drape of sarees and the skill of neighbourhood tailors; Indian men having long dumped dhotis in favour of shirts and trousers are now largely size-wise. But the fact that India is about to embark on a National Sizing Survey — which also includes men — indicates that serious measures are afoot to size us all up.

Clothing sizes began formally in the west barely 75 years ago, egged on by the mail-order catalogue shopping trend, and the current online shopping boom in India has probably prompted this sizing up. But standardisation never really took off there, leading most clothing chains to use their own size charts and now people feel slimmer simply by just going to an appropriate store. Given India’s multifarious diversities, however, can it ever be sized up uniformly or accurately?