"One Size Fits All" And Other Lies They Tell Us

I used to think “one size fits all” was just bad marketing. Optimistic, maybe. A little dishonest, sure, but harmless. Like, the retail equivalent of a restaurant calling a portion “family style” when it clearly wasn’t built to feed a family.

I don’t think that anymore.

“One size fits all” isn’t a sizing description. It’s a verdict, and the trick is that it gets delivered somewhere private, so nobody at the company ever has to say it to your face. You find out what it actually means alone, in a fitting room, holding a poncho that won’t get past your elbows.

What nobody tells you while you’re standing there wrestling withthis allegedly universally-sized scrap of fabric is that “all” was never literal. It never meant everyone. What it actually meant was closer to: we made one size, and calling it “all” sounds considerably better than admitting who we decided not to make it for.

And here’s where I call BS.

Because in women’s clothing, garments labelled “one size” are typically built around something close to a medium. What the actual…? Yes, a medium with enough stretch or looseness to accommodate some bodies on either side. Medium, with wiggle room, and apparently a sufficiently confident marketing department to turn that into all.

Except the average North American woman isn’t a medium.

The numbers make “most” even more interesting. Current CDC (US) measurements put the average American woman’s waist at 38.5 inches. And in a 2024 dataset of more than 42,000 American women, the most common dress size was 16 and more than half wore a size 14 or above. So when a brand makes one relatively small garment and calls it “one size fits most,” I have a fairly obvious follow-up question: most who?

That’s not a sizing problem. That’s marketing.

Brandy Melville has at least been unusually committed to the bit. The brand became famous for selling much of its clothing in one small size, historically marketed as “one size fits most.” And “most,” in this particular use of the English language, has done some extraordinary heavy lifting.

Because when a garment labelled for “all” or “most” fits you, you don’t think much about it. Of course it fits. You’re part of all. When it doesn’t, something subtly flips. The garment isn’t the exception anymore. You are.

That’s the part I hate.

Most brands don’t actually say, “If this doesn’t fit you, your body is the problem.” That would be appalling marketing. They don’t have to. The language does the work for them. The company chose the garment. The company chose the measurements. The company chose to manufacture one size instead of five or ten or twenty. And somehow your thighs end up taking the meeting.

I’ve written about this from the other side of a fluffy white spa robe, because spas have their own version of exactly the same trick: “one size fits most.” Most WHO? I’ve stood in enough change rooms holding a robe that wrapped around me like a napkin around a turkey leg to have some follow-up questions.

And again, I don’t need every robe in the world to fit me. I don’t need every dress to fit me. I don’t expect every company to manufacture every garment in every conceivable size. I just want them to tell the truth.

Give me the measurements. Say “fits a 34–40 inch bust.” Say “runs small.” Say “XS–S.” Say “available to 2X.” Say exactly who you made the thing for and let me decide whether I want it. There is absolutely nothing wrong with a garment having a limit. There is something wrong with calling the limit all.

While we’re here, can we talk about a few of the other things we’ve apparently agreed are true?

“True to size.” True to whose size? A 16 can fit beautifully in one store, refuse to go over your hips in another and be weirdly enormous somewhere else. There is no sacred Size 16 stored in a climate-controlled vault that every fashion company is required to copy. Brands use different measurements, patterns, fit models, grading and fabrics. And yet when the jeans don’t button, our first thought is somehow, I’ve gone up a size. Maybe. Or maybe two companies made two different pairs of pants.

“Plus size starts at…” At what? Apparently you can be straight-sized in one store, walk forty-five seconds through the mall and become plus size. Quite a transformation. The dividing line changes from retailer to retailer because we made it up. It describes how companies organize and manufacture clothing, not two biologically distinct varieties of women.

“Size inclusive.” I actually like this phrase when it means something. The problem is that sometimes it means a genuinely broad range of sizes and sometimes it means, Good news, ladies! We added XXL. There isn’t one universal standard a company has to meet before it gets to call itself size inclusive. Ditto “extended sizing,” which raises another fairly obvious question: extended from what? Even the language assumes there’s a normal starting point and then some of us are…the extension.

“Flattering.” Oh, flattering. I spent years believing this was an objective quality a piece of clothing possessed, like being waterproof. For bigger women, “flattering” has very often meant one thing: makes you look smaller. Dark colours. Vertical stripes. Define the waist. Skim the stomach. Don’t add bulk. Cover your arms. Apparently the highest achievement of a perfectly lovely dress is convincing strangers that there is slightly less of you inside it.

“Problem areas.” My stomach isn’t having a problem. My upper arms haven’t submitted a complaint. My thighs are actually doing an excellent job of being thighs. But somewhere along the way, perfectly ordinary pieces of women’s anatomy became situations requiring strategic fabric deployment. Hide this. Minimize that. Disguise the other thing. Getting dressed became an elaborate witness-protection program for our own bodies.

And maybe that’s why “one size fits all” bothers me more now than it used to. It’s not just a stupid tag. It’s part of a much bigger habit we’ve developed of treating decisions made by the clothing industry as information about women’s bodies.

The company chooses the measurements. The company chooses the fit model. The company chooses the pattern, the grading, the fabric, the size range and the number that eventually gets sewn into the back. But when that manufactured object doesn’t fit the human being who tries it on, somehow we’ve been taught to look at the human being for the manufacturing defect.

Nope.

The garment is the manufactured object. Your body is the customer.

And the average American woman wearing a size 16 to 18 was never the exception to the rule. She was standing somewhere pretty close to the middle of it the entire time.

Maybe it’s time the labels caught up.