Voice of London

In the UK, fashion is a  multi-billion pound industry, but it doesn’t come without its problems.

Sizing has come under scrutiny recently, with shops being slammed on Twitter for making their clothes so much smaller than the label states.

We wanted to put sizing to the test at some of the UK’s top fashion chains, and what better clothing item to test than jeans. According to statistics from Statistic Brain Research Institute, the average woman owns seven pairs of jeans, with 1.2 billion pairs being sold worldwide each year.

We visited H&M, Topshop, Zara, and River Island to try their jeans for size and see if the sizing problems across each shop is still a problem.

As you can see the results were pretty shocking. The labels on these jeans all claim to be the same size, but that is clearly not the case and could be potentially very damaging to a nation where, according to Beat Eating Disorders, approximately 1.25 million people have an eating disorder.

H&M, in particular, has received a huge backlash online because of their inconsistent sizing. In a statement to Cosmopolitan Magazine, H&M said: “H&M hugely values all customer feedback. It is only ever our intention to design and make clothes that make our customers feel good about themselves, any other outcome is neither intended nor desired. H&M’s sizes are global and the sizes offered in the UK are the same in all the 66 markets in which we operate and online. As there is no global mandatory sizing standard, sizes will differ between brands and different markets. Our dedicated, in-house sizing department works according to an average of the sizes and measurements suggested by the markets we operate in. H&M sizes are continually reviewed by our in-house sizing department.”

Words & Video: Ruby Naldrett | Subbing: Lucija Duzel

Featured Image: Public Domain Pictures via Pexels

 

Related posts:

“We are bombarded by images of others… we feel powerless to escape”

Face to face: the rise of editing apps