Wednesday, September 29, 2010

take on pants

Whenever I get fitted for a tuxedo or a suit, the tailor takes my measurements and I'm shocked.   He'll be working on my measurments and then say something like..  "pants are 38 x 34".   my thought is Wait a second, I know i'm not a 38 waist, there must be a gigantic mistake but I don't want to cause a scene.   I've always figured that this guy is using a centimeter ruler and has screwed up the conversion and since the pants always come back fitting well, I have never put more thought to it.  
 
But it's never really sat well with me, tt just didn't make sense when comparing everything and it's not like he's measuring my hips.  I look in my closet and all my pants are either a 34 or 35 waist, how the hell are my tuxedo pants 3" wider around the gut.
 
See everybody assumes that chicks are more vain when it comes to the size of their clothes but I came across a gawker post the other day where the researchers went to a bunch of stores to check the actual waist sizes and compared them against the size they were labeled and found them to be radically different than how they were labeled.
 
Here are the actual measurements for alleged 36-inch pants taken by Sauer as he tried on men's casual dress pants:
  • H&M: 37"
  • Calvin Klein: 38.5"
  • Alfani: 38.5"
  • Gap: 39"
  • Haggar: 39"
  • Dockers: 39.5"
  • Old Navy: A whopping 41"
I'm all for a little white-lie to make me feel better but now it starts to make some sense.   I'll put on a pair of jeans from Banana Republic and I can't even shoehorn them over my big chick-thighs and then I'll throw on a pair of Old Navy ones and I'm swimming in them.  Here I thought it was all about the cut, now I realize that i've just been duped... no wonder I have 5 pairs of Old Navy Jeans hanging in my closet, it's a gigantic ego-stroke
 
 
 

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