It’s so bad that my fiancée has some bras that say she’s a B cup and others that says she’s a D cup. In order to go bra shopping, you have to actually try them on to find out if they fit.

If I had to try on underwear to see if they fit, I might not bother with underwear at all!

  • Adudethatis@lemmy.ca
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    18 minutes ago

    Grade 9- girlfriend at the time was “blessed” so to speak. Learned e women have a much more difficult time finding bras and underwear that “work” than most men do.

  • Captain Aggravated@sh.itjust.works
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    6 minutes ago

    Men’s clothing sizes are a little dumb sometimes but I can usually take a tape measure to my waist and correctly order pants. Your guess is as good as mine what the difference between “boot cut” and “relaxed fit” are, and I would swear T-shirt sizes have shrunk since I was a teenager. As in, I can compare a Medium I’ve had since the Dubya administration to an XL today. But getting fitted for a suit, they measure me in inches and the clothing is more or less sized in inches.

    Women’s clothing sizes have had two different ice pick lobotomies. Women come in a wider range of sizes and aspect ratios, women’s clothing is pretty much universally designed to fit tighter, but on the rack they’re given one meaningless size number. a 12 is bigger than a 10, who knows by how much, and there’s nothing on the girl you can measure with a tape to get that number, and there is no standard here at all. Why they haven’t revolted I have no idea.

    • Sonor@lemmy.world
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      3 hours ago

      This. I mostly buy size S t-shirts, sometimes M, occassionally XS. I dont even care anymore.

      • Tolookah@discuss.tchncs.de
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        3 hours ago

        If the shirt isn’t xl, I can’t raise my hands without showing my belly.

        Also if the shirt is bigger than L, I’m swimming in it.

        • snooggums@lemmy.world
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          3 hours ago

          I have a long torso and broad shoulders, so I have to get xl tall shirts in some brands because most make their standard xl shirts wider but not taller than med and small.

          Banana Republic is the shortest length. Hurley is the best length.

      • phoneymouse@lemmy.world
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        2 hours ago

        I’m between a medium and a large. More often then not though, I need the shoulder width and arm length of a large, but the cut in the torso of a medium. Clothing manufacturers assume Americans scale horizontally as they scale vertically. This maybe true given our obesity crisis.

    • sunzu2@thebrainbin.org
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      2 hours ago

      All is a strecht… But yeah once marketing took over that function, it got turned into whatever the fuck we got now in the US🤡

  • LainTrain@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    3 hours ago

    It’s also the fact that cup size is not necessarily independent from band size, that’s where the trick is. I used to think I’m an A with a high band size as I’m huge with no booba, like a 39A or something but those never fit that well.

    According to ABraThatFits methodology I’m actually 36C, which somehow does fit and super well, though by common and dudebro methodology I’m most certainly more of an “A cup” if that makes sense.

    • Clay_pidgin@sh.itjust.works
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      It’s because whatever maniac invented the sizing scheme decided that every letter represents 2 inches more around your body at the weirdest boobage point than just below it. What a bonkers system! A woman with 38B bras is 38 inches around at the band, and 40 inches around at the girls. Nonsense. The way dudes THINK it works makes so much more sense.

  • Rhynoplaz@lemmy.world
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    2 hours ago

    The cup size SHOULD be the difference in inches between the circumference below the breast and circumference around the breast.

    3" difference would be a C cup

    5" would be DD.

    Why they double up some letters and not others, I couldn’t tell you. 🤷🏻‍♂️

    My ex used to sell underwear.

  • dariusj18@lemmy.world
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    4 hours ago

    Have her go and get fitted. Many women don’t know what their band/cup size really is.

    Also, IMO, women’s pant sizes are where the real absurdity in sizes is.

    • Wugmeister@lemmy.dbzer0.comOP
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      4 hours ago

      Not much help to know what cup size you are if the bra companies are only pretending to be standardized

      • ValiantDust@feddit.org
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        3 hours ago

        Only knowing your cup size is not enough. You need to know the underbust size as well. A 32D and a 34C have cups with the same volume. Sure, there is still some variance but not as much as I thought before I learned that.

        Edit: This calculator and the community of the same name on the-site-that-shall-not-be-named helped me a lot in finding my actual bra size. Now my only problem is that almost no company here has more than two or three bras in that size…

        • dingus@lemmy.world
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          2 hours ago

          Interesting website! I’ll have to remember to try this when I can find where I put my tape measure.

          Personally, once I found bralettes I’ve never gone back. My boobs are small enough that they work just fine. The comfort level has gone up by like ten billion. Bras without underwire come in second but still not the greatest. I just can’t really understand bras with underwire.

          Tbh, I’m able to go braless under loose fitting sweaters, but for any other shirt, I just don’t have the right boob shape for it.

          • proudblond@lemmy.world
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            41 minutes ago

            I think underwire is more important the larger your breast volume is. I was recently at an event with a bunch of women who’ve known each other for a long time and we did a game where an emcee asked a question and then we went to a side of the room that fit our personal answer. One of them was 1) underwire, 2) no wire, 3) no bra. As I shuffled over to the underwire side, one of my pals joked that this was just a way to separate us by breast size. And sure enough, those of us with the wires tended to be on the heavier-cupped side, and the small number of no-bra ladies were quite petite.

            I tried bralettes once and they didn’t work for me at all. I’m too big for them to provide any support so they just buckled, essentially. It’s a bummer because some of them are so cute! But my girls are just too heavy. And the only thing that keeps them in line is the damn wire. I will say that being fitted correctly does help the wire feel more comfortable though.

  • TomMasz@lemmy.world
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    3 hours ago

    It was a long time ago that I realized that women’s clothing sizing was largely fiction. Trying to buy clothing for a girlfriend or (later) my wife based on the tag of something they already owned was an exercise in futility.

  • palordrolap@fedia.io
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    2 hours ago

    I think this is filed in my head under “no two manufacturers’ sizes are the same (even if they’re supposed to be to a standard)”, and “this is especially true of women’s wear”, so while I may have known about bra cup sizes specifically at some point in the past, I’m not sure I did at the time I arrived at this post, and yet am thoroughly unsurprised to (re)discover it.