We try on clothing that weren’t made to fit us—and blame our bodies.
But the problem isn’t our bodies.
It’s the fundamental flaws built into the fashion industry – from conceptualizing a garment to shipping it to the customer.
I came into fashion because I love textiles: the way fabric holds lineage and history, the immense artisan labor that goes into creating cloth, the intimate connection to cycles of nature observed in slow fashion production. But the longer I worked, the more I realized my studio was swimming upstream in an industry built on narrow data, narrower ideals, and one that profits from our dissatisfaction. Once I became conscious of all this, I couldn’t unsee it.
What follows is what I’ve learned—the history and the writers and thinkers that opened up my mind to the contradictions—about how we got such a toxic system, why it keeps failing our bodies, and some ideas about what I’m going to do next.
The history of “standard” sizing
In the late 1930s and early 1940s, the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Bureau of Home Economics led a federally funded attempt to standardize women’s apparel sizing. Technicians measured the weight and fifty-eight different body dimensions of 14,698 women across the United States and published the results in 1941 as Women’s Measurements for Clothing and Pattern Construction.
The sampling was deeply skewed; the study had low representation of older women and was dangerously biased toward young, unmarried (read = those who hadn’t birthed a child) white women. That bias helped produce a sizing system that never reflected the true diversity of women’s bodies in the United States.
Because the 1941 study defined the “standard” from a narrow, skewed sample, everything built on top of it compounded the flaw—most notably by importing a menswear fit logic into womenswear. Instead of starting from women’s real shape diversity, later standards (the 1958 commercial tables and federal “PS 42”) adopted a single-anchor approach—picking one measurement, the bust, as the anchor and then predicting the rest (waist, hip, rise, torso length) by fixed ratios. That shortcut comes from men’s and especially military sizing, where using the chest to estimate other dimensions is often “good enough” because men’s bodies tend to vary more in scale than shape. But this logic quickly breaks down for women, whose bodies vary far more in proportion: two people with the same bust can have very different waists, hips, shoulder widths, ribcage shapes, and torso lengths—differences that also shift across age, ethnicity, and life stage. Even so, the charts enforced those ratios, quietly installing the hourglass as the default.
In 1983, the federal government withdrew its last women’s sizing guideline, which meant there was no longer a common baseline for what any given size number should mean. Without a standard, “size” stopped being a shared measurement and became brand-specific code. One brand’s 8 might equal another’s 12. Even within one label, jeans and dresses and trousers can follow different charts. That mismatch isn’t about your body—it’s about which code you’re reading.
Fashion sells aspiration; not fit
The brand-specific sizing system doesn’t exist in a vacuum; it’s hitched to fashion’s bigger engine—selling aspiration. When size numbers can shift, the “ideal” body can shift too, and glossy marketing campaigns stitch the two together. The promise isn’t “this will fit you,” but “this will move you closer to the body we’ve crowned as ideal right now.” To keep us reaching, that ideal keeps changing.
This is evidenced by cycles of ideal body standards – a cycle that has shifted decade by decade over centuries. In recent decades, we’ve moved from thin-and-waifish, athletic-and-toned, glamazon statuesque, back to hyper-thin “heroin chic,” and then to a “Bootylicious” silhouette. Those shifts are well documented: Twiggy’s 1960s waif, Farrah Fawcett’s ’70s sporty glamour, the ’80s supermodel body (Cindy Crawford, Naomi Campbell), the ’90s Kate Moss minimalism, and the 2000s–2010s fixation on curves. Each “ideal” maintains a narrow field of belonging while pretending to expand it.
From one unattainable body type to another. Left to right: Twiggy, Cindy Crawford, Naomi Campbell, Beyonce
Those ideals don’t just live on magazine covers; they set the template the industry’s supply chain builds for. To keep runway shows, showrooms, and factory sampling efficient, the industry standardizes around a very small “sample size” (think roughly 34–24–34). Models are hired to fit the sample; the sample is rarely made to fit models—let alone customers. It’s a cost-and-speed choice the whole system rewards.
If you’ve ever felt like you were the “wrong” shape because a garment could not possibly hang the way it did on a campaign image—know this: you weren’t failing. You were meeting an industrial workflow designed around an “ideal” body that doesn’t map onto most humans.
Who benefits from our shame?
In the United States, beauty has never been neutral. Our “standard” face and body were built around whiteness—and around thinness as a moral proxy—inside a racist, white-supremacist, patriarchal order. That order sets the baseline and then calls it universal. Even when BIPOC beauty is celebrated, it’s often celebrated in terms that whiteness controls: certain features are praised when they appear on non-Black or light-skinned bodies, while those same features on Black women are policed, mocked, or punished. The message stays the same: whiteness and thinness are the reference points; everything else is deviation to be managed.
This is a history you can trace across a single body part. In Butts: A Backstory, Heather Radke shows how the butt becomes a screen for race, gender, class, and desire—“a site of attraction, a site of revulsion,” a cultural bellwether. Read that history and a pattern emerges: Saartjie (aka Sarah) Baartman’s dehumanization in nineteenth-century Europe; the Victorian bustle as conspicuous display; late-twentieth-century pop moments that fetishize curves; and, more recently, the monetized churn of surgical trends and traffic-chasing stories about celebrity body changes. What changes isn’t our anatomy; it’s the meanings—and the fashion trends—that get attached to it. Fashion doesn’t float above this; it feeds on it, selling desire more than clothing. If the ideal is always moving, we keep buying toward it.
Here’s the plain reality: the average U.S. woman wears around a 16–18—that’s the center, not the edge. Yet the fix isn’t a token “plus” rack; it’s designing for the full spread of bodies and proportions. Women vary in ribcage and shoulder shape, bust–waist–hip ratios, rises and torso lengths, where ease is needed, and how bodies change over time. Two people with the same bust can have very different waists and hips; two with the same hip can have totally different rises. When sizing relies on a single “anchor” measurement to predict everything else, most people are excluded by design.
Serving more bodies also makes business sense. Brands that build multiple base blocks, fit on multiple bodies, and offer the full size run in every style see customers convert—because they can finally see themselves in the clothing. Rolling back extended sizes or shunting them to a separate experience isn’t logistics; it’s a choice. The barrier isn’t technical; it’s ideological.
Upstream, the sample-size choke point keeps the system narrow. Runways and showrooms default to one tiny set of measurements because it’s cheaper and faster, so models are hired to fit samples; samples aren’t made to fit models—let alone customers. That workflow, not any one designer, turns a small template into the norm and makes every other body “other.”
What this has meant for me
Running Istani taught me that “standard” processes weren’t built for real bodies. To make sustainable fashion, I had to bend those processes. That also meant eating costs bigger brands push onto customers. The more I tried to fix it from the inside, the clearer it became: a small studio can’t rewire a global fashion supply chain alone.
My discomfort started with my experience with own body and the worktable. My proportions don’t fit the “standard” block, and every fitting proved how grading stretches shapes it was never meant to honor. Once a pattern gets scaled, it belongs to math, not people. Learning how the system runs only made me less willing to keep smoothing over the realities of women’s bodies to fit a template.
I love design and entrepreneurship, but the industry’s standardization—tiny sample sizes, the “ideal” fit model, buyers steering toward the narrowest form—boxed me in. It took extraordinary effort just to make a garment that didn’t lie to your body.
So I’m pausing clothing production because I want to create outside an economy that profits from our shame. I want to write, convene, and experiment in public with ways of being and creating that start from how we actually are—across sizes, ratios, ages, genders—and welcome the countless stories history tried to edit out. I don’t have all the answers, but I’m here to help build patterns—of thought, fabric, and community—that refuse to apologize for the bodies we live in.
Meanwhile, all remaining Istani pieces are available on a Pay-What-You-Can Basis. Explore the collection here