gender: figurant

Bodily autonomy (like abortion, anti draft, etc) -> “The government shouldn’t be able to force anything on my body I don’t want.”

Anti surveillance -> “I don’t trust big government/big tech (big brother if you’re feeling frisky) with the ability to spy on me and my family.”

Immigration -> “Next to all of us immigrated at some point, I don’t see why the elites get to decide who’s allowed to be where. What’s to stop them coming for me?”

Climate Change -> “Big oil shouldn’t get to determine whether or not I get to go places. I don’t want to be dependent on some big business to survive.”

State Violence -> “I don’t want the goddamn secret police breathing down my neck! I trust my community a whole hell of a lot more to help me than I do the state!”

They don't want people to understand that "the problem" they have is that the jeans aren't made for them. Manufacturers prefer for them to continue buying jeans they don't like and feeling like their body is the problem.

Let's imagine a pretty simple dress with straps instead of sleeves and a skirt that starts at the natural waist. Even there, I encounter a problem where the straps are often long enough on me that my entire boobs would hang out of the dress entirely. Then the actual bodice needs to be within a pretty narrow range to be the right size for my boobs, and then there's a separate narrow range for it to be the right size for my natural waist. Plus a distance between the top and my natural waist, of course. And yet another for my hips/butt. And then my ratio between how much my butt sticks out back and my stomach sticks out front has to match with the assumption the maker made or else the hem will be uneven. For a dress made like this out of woven material, it's not uncommon for people to only really *properly* fit into them during a single part of the month, and find them too tight or too loose when their weight changes with their cycle. (Stretch materials are thankfully usually good enough to handle this much variation, at least)

And that's a dress! We don't even have to perfectly fit so many aspects of the whole crotch nightmare region you get with pants and shorts!

We can see an improvement already if I split the garment into two. Now I only need the shirt to match me on the strap length, bust range, and natural waist. And notably, the length suddenly has a much wider range of allowance. It can be significantly "too long" for my body and it's basically fine, because I can tuck it into the skirt.

And then if the skirt's waistband is too wide for my natural waist, I might be able to wear it lower.

By separating the garments we have made some measurements suddenly almost irrelevant and we reduce the number that need to correlate with each other on a single garment.

We can do this more. Historically, we did this more. If you look at various times in history, for example, one of those fancy-looking (to us) dress bodices might be somewhere between 2-4 separate pieces held onto the body via being pinned to the stays beneath. By trading off some difficulty in getting dressed and using a very sturdy and very adjustable undergarment, they can have garment pieces that always look basically perfectly fitted even as the body changes shape.

There are also other methods. One option is clothing that is layered and cinched into shape. With fewer layers, you have stuff like the chiton and the toga. With more, you have stuff like kimono and hanfu.

My point with all of this is: I think a better world is possible. But merely listing all the measurements, while an improvement perhaps and a step towards demystifying clothing, would not be enough.

Sewing clothing solely to order at highly specific measurements is also ridiculous as a general practice and shouldn't be the answer for most regular-use clothing. Standard sizes have huge benefits for the labor efficiency of clothes manufacturing, which you should care about if you don't want to waste human time.