STANFORD, CA—Apparel and textile researchers at Stanford University reported Thursday that, after 18 months of comparing garment and accessory sizes to the wearer’s actual measurements, 80 percent of American women are currently wearing the wrong size bras, shirts, shoes, pants, and hats. “Once we took accurate body measurements and cross-referenced them with items of clothing instead of, say, allowing women to hold garments up against themselves while looking in the mirror, we discovered that four out of five have it completely wrong,” said lead researcher Gloria Denton concerning the report, which also found that the 20 percent of women who managed to find a pair of decent-fitting shoes or a hat that didn’t drop over their eyes were still wearing pants or tops that were either too tight, too loose, the wrong length, or simply draped poorly over their bodies. “In extreme cases, we discovered women shopping online will repeatedly use the wrong sock, belt, glove, and even ring size to purchase clothing. Moreover, collected data demonstrate that a full 100 percent of all women were wearing bras with incorrect measurements in every aspect of band width, strap length, and cup size, although we concluded you can’t really blame them for that. It’s almost worse than buying decent jeans—I mean, jeans? Fuck me.” The report linked findings to a variety of factors, notably “vanity sizes” and brand disparities among clothing manufacturers, but maintained that the root cause of the issue was in there being absolutely no reference for accuracy as no woman on record has ever worn a complete ensemble that all fit.

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