THE MEASURE OF MANKIND

(CAPTION: The four women whose laser body scans are compared here have similar bust, waist and hip measurements -- but the laser sees that they have strikingly different body shapes. So how can they all wear the same size 10? Image: TC2.)

This is the dawning of the Age of Anthropometrics. Yes, lucky reader, you are privileged to live in a time when the science of measuring man (and woman) has achieved a level of precision virtually unimaginable even a dozen years ago. Even better, clothing manufacturers and retailers are finally paying attention. Best-case scenario: In just a few years, our clothes could fit better than they have since the early 1800s, when everything was still custom-made.

About time, too. Long after other technologies had been electrified, automated, digitized, etc., anthropometrics lagged behind, staying stubbornly manual, and relying on the same poky old measuring tapes and yardsticks. It takes a prohibitively long time to take all of a person's relevant measurements with a measuring tape, and it allows for a discouraging amount of slippage. (Studies have found that even measurements taken by expert tailors can vary by as much as 2 inches.)

Laser body scanning changed that, made it possible to know, really and truly, what size we are and what shape we're in.

But did anybody but scientists really want to know?

As recently as 1994, the American Society for Testing and Materials announced it was throwing in the towel on a major anthropometric study because too few American clothing manufacturers and retailers signed on to sponsor it. At the time, more than half of all shoppers complained that the clothes in the stores didn't fit them right, but most stores and apparel makers seemed to think it was somebody else's problem: Other people's sizes might be too big or too small, but theirs, they thought, were just right.

Even four years ago, when a nonprofit technology organization called TC2 (the initials stand for Textile Clothing Technology Corp.) launched a study to scan 11,000 Americans, with support from the U.S. Commerce Department, it remained to be seen whether apparel makers would actually get with the program and use the data to make clothes fit better.

Now it's clear: Many already have and more will.

A few weeks ago, I wrote about Lane Bryant's new Right Fit jeans, based on "Virtual Fitting Room" scans of 14,000 Lane Bryant customers by Intellifit Corp. When Lane Bryant's in-house size experts looked at the data, they saw that a customer with a 34-inch waist could have hips that measured anywhere from 36 inches to 47 inches -- a range no single size could cover. So, for each waist size, they built three different fits: A woman with a 34-inch waist wears a "straight" if her hip measurement is between 36 inches and 39 inches; she's "moderately curvy" if her hips measure between 40 inches and 43 inches; she's "curvy" if her hips are between 44 inches and 47 inches.

Lots of other apparel makers have also faced the fact that not all women with the same waist size can wear the same pair of trousers. Gap has added a line-up of "curvy" sizes for customers with smaller waists and bigger hips.

At J.C. Penney's, one of the original sponsors of the TC2 SizeUSA study, the data "allowed us to see who our customer was," says Michael Hannaford, Penney's global technical design director. "We examined all the data, and it helped us think more about proportion and body type." Penney's found that 43 percent of its sample were pear-shaped, 37 percent were more apple- or diamond-shaped, and 19 percent were straighter, more like a rectangle. Penney's updated the body specifications its sizes are built on to, among other things, provide more room in the waist. The company also rethought the fit of its core pants program, offering more lengths and a choice of different silhouettes with different waist positions.

The final puzzle piece, Hannaford says, is making sure that the styling of each house brand lines up with its fit -- so a serious suit that attracts the attention of a businesswoman doesn't turn out to be cut to fit a 14-year-old.

"We're all looking at how we can give our customer the truest, most flattering fit," says Lands' End's Michele Casper. "We try to make sure we're catching everything."

When Lands' End's technical designers checked their data, they found that 70 percent of their customers had hip-to-waist ratios that gave them relatively straight figures. They introduced a "curvy" fit for the other 30 percent who fit the classic "hourglass" mold.

Because they'd been monitoring customer preference data as well as size numbers, they knew that many customers had been appalled when the jeans market went overwhelmingly to ultra-low rises and skinny fits. "We're fitting 30-year-olds, but we're also fitting 70-year-olds," Casper says. So their new line of jeans includes four different rises, with waistbands that range from right at the natural waist to a couple of inches below, and a choice of leg shapes (tapered, bootcut, trouser), as well as a number of different fabrics and washes. Their new premium 47Indigo stretch denim jeans come in sizes 16W to 26W (as well as 4 to 18) for women who haven't been able to find premium denim in plus sizes.

Lands' End, which does a lot of its business online or by catalog, may have been quicker to see the usefulness of anthropometric data than some companies that sell clothes strictly from bricks-and-mortar stores. When Lands' End customers try things on and don't like the fit, they send them back -- and they fill out a merchandise return form that asks for specifics: Is it too big in the waist, too big in the hips, too long, too short, etc.?

At your favorite local mall store, by contrast, dozens of women can try on the same size-10 pair of pants and discover that the waistband is too tight to button -- but management never finds out. There's no paper trail.

According to TC2's Jim Lovejoy, another place anthropometric data is having an impact is the world of dressmaker's dummies. Shapely Shadow, a Los Angeles company that makes dress forms for the apparel industry, is about to introduce a line of forms that embody the SizeUSA scan data. Shapely Shadow's Ilona Foyer says that she can merge 10 or 15 different body scans that roughly correspond to a given dress size and, by layering them one over the other, create a size 10 that's shaped like real women. For companies that have their clothing manufactured offshore, she says, buying several identical forms will be almost as good as being able to clone a fit model: A designer in New York and a cutting supervisor in China will be able to try identical sample garments on identical dress forms, and make adjustments to get the fit exactly right.

Recently, Lovejoy says, TC2 scanned 1,400 Victoria's Secret customers to help the company refine its bra designs. After careful analysis of the scans, six Victoria's Secret technical designers came to a breakthrough conclusion: Breasts come in four distinctive shapes that vary independently of a woman's size, geographic location, age or ethnicity. No wonder it's so hard to find a bra that fits right. The people at Victoria's Secret wouldn't tell me any more about the four breast profiles they discovered -- but it's probably only a matter of time before they come out with bras designed to fit them.

COPYRIGHT 2007 PATRICIA MCLAUGHLIN