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!
Clothing sizing in general is just arcane at this point.
This. I mostly buy size S t-shirts, sometimes M, occassionally XS. I dont even care anymore.
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.
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.
Today years old.
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.
Not much help to know what cup size you are if the bra companies are only pretending to be standardized
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…
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.
And it is more complicated even than that. I am a small busted woman and yet the best fit I can get is 34D. The 34 makes sense, underbust is 33. The D is what I measure but most have too much room. I still need that size because the circumference of the boobs fits in that wire; any smaller is too narrow.
I think bras need 3 measurements not 2. I need band 34, wire size D, cup capacity closer to C. And there are plenty of women in the opposite situation too, with more projection but smaller circumference.
So the non-standardized sizing is a workaround for that problem.
There are plenty of brands that follow mostly standard sizing, as I understand it. But popular brands in the US (like Victoria Secret) generally don’t.
I fell down the r/abrathatfits rabbit hole one day, years ago. It’s fascinating.
I once talked to my girlfriend about bra sizes and how much i don’t understand them. Then we both googled bra sizes and how often women wear the wrong size and fit and all. It’s a whole science behind it and it’s quite interesting. Now, 10 years later i still often think: oh no, she wears a bra that doesn’t fit right and probably doesn’t even know it.
Yup! “Oh, she should probably go down a band size and up a cup size” popped into my head one day and I laughed at the absurdity.
I introduced my wife to the world of proper bra fit, because she’d never known any of it. No one taught her. Made me feel vaguely guilty of mansplaining, but it helped!
Well, today years old. Thanks.
