to live for the hope of it all

Long ago everyone's clothes were made for them custom, and were either so unfitted that it didn't matter how you were shaped or they were created with built-in size adjusting elements so you could adapt them to your body as your body changed. (Lacing is great for this.)

Then we got into the era of ready-to-wear clothing, where you could walk into a shop and buy something. These were still being handmade probably on site (or in a workshop very nearby), and were created with the assumption that the purchaser would make any needed alterations to get the fit they desired. This was also in an era where it was expected that you would achieve the fashionable silhouette via shapewear and padding and tailoring - like, fat women in the Victorian era also wore shoulderpads and hip pads, because the fashionable thing was a particular set of proportions and it was not expected that people's bodies would meet those proportions unaltered.

Then we got into an era of mass-produced ready-to-wear clothing, where you'd have size sets of a particular pattern made into multiple sizes of that garment. This is where numbered sizing or the XS-XXL size runs start to show up. We start to lose the assumption of tailoring as a normal part of the process (and some clothes are not being designed for tailoring as an option), and also where we get into Foz's thing about clothing being made to fit one (1) woman.

Enter the fit model.

A fashion house/clothing manufacturer/designer ideally draws a design, then creates a pattern for the design, sews a sample (or more than one sample if they have a few ideas to test out), and then they bring in their fit model and have her try it on. The fit model's job can be as uninvolved as "standing there and letting people poke at the garment and pin it in various places" or as involved as "doing some aerobics and telling the designer how the garment functions." A fit model is not a runway model - the fit model needs to maintain a consistent set of measurements, but that set of measurements depends on what the designer has designated as their sample size. Women's fit models are frequently a size small, I'll admit that up front, but that's not universal. (The company where my wife works, which makes athletic wear, recently switched from a size small fit model to a size medium because they found that hewed more closely to their target market.)

Once the garment has been fitted to the model and all issues worked out with the pattern, the pattern will be graded to create the rest of the sizes in the set. This is where Foz's "scaling her up or down like a photo in MS paint" bit comes from, which is indeed what happens when you don't pay for a skilled patternmaker. There are grading rules assigned to the pattern to make it larger and/or smaller depending on the direction it needs to go, and if those grading rules have been applied correctly and customized as needed, the resulting pattern and garments should actually make sense for human bodies of a similar proportion to the original fit model.

...unless you want an extended size set beyond the XXL, because it's 100% correct that you can't keep grading up a Small pattern indefinitely - that's a surefire way to end up with clothing that has absolutely bewildering proportions. A designer that actually cares about providing extended sizing will, usually at that XXL break, create an entirely new pattern, sew up an entirely new sample, and hire a fat fit model to test those samples on. This is why you'll see straight sizing and plus sizing listed as separate categories on some clothing retail websites - they're different lines created from different sample sizes.

The company where my wife works has been putting a lot of effort into developing an extended size range, including shopping around for size set information from some of the big sizing companies to find one that works (some of them don't even offer extended sizing datasets!!!), testing out different plus-size dressforms, and auditioning a bunch of fat fit models. (I've seen the fat dressform they ended up with as their extended range sample size and I'm actually really impressed with it - like it even has a belly pooch! It looks like a person!) Then they had to made the designs, and sew the samples, and try them on the fit models, and then because they're an athletic wear company that cares about function they got wear testers to actually use the garments for their intended athletic purposes and report back about what worked and what didn't, and then take that wear testing into account and tweak the patterns, and and and...

All of this costs money, obviously, so what if you're cheap? Well, you might not offer any extended sizing at all, because keeping to one size set is a great way to lower your costs. What if you're even cheaper than that? Well, you don't technically need a fit model, right? You can buy a data set of sizing information from one of the big brokers and work directly from that, no need for pesky in-person fittings or feedback. You can make your patternmaker auto-apply grading rules to get your size set, and send that to the factory without bothering to tweak it or adjust it in any way. Then you can make garments that have minimal seam allowances, so it's almost impossible to alter them, out of the cheapest fabric possible, so they fall apart after three washes. It doesn't matter if they don't fit well because you're already moving onto the next thing, and the consumer get the cheap clothes they demand, and no one's happy.

[slaps down Uno card] THE PROBLEM IS CAPITALISM!!!

This also doesn't even get into the different fit proportions of different designers - like, I love Morningwitch's designs but their fit of choice is "boxy," aka garments with very little in the way of shaping. I do not enjoy wearing boxy garments, so I know if I buy a Morningwitch garment that I'll have to make alterations to it in order to get the fit I want. On the other size of the spectrum you have a place like Trashy Diva, which is deliberately going for a vintage Hollywood Starlet Va Va Voom type of fit, with things that are fitted through the bust and waist but flare out at the hips. Both of these shops have an extended size range, but their fit priorities could not be more different from each other!

Listen, the fashion industry has a lot of problems, I will not deny that, but the people on the garment side of things are not all locked in a vast conspiracy to make you feel bad about yourself when the clothes don't fit. It's a massive interlocking puzzle of market pressures and technical requirements and it's complicated by a consumer market that 1. has been trained to constantly expect new designs all the time and 2. has been trained to think they shouldn't have to pay more than $20 for anything ever. Clothes that have been fitted to a fit model are actually made to fit a person, and if you have similar proportions to that fit model you're golden. It costs more to have a fit model, though, and it is an annoying amount of work to try to find a company with a fit model that matches you, and we'd all be a lot happier if tailoring was an accepted, normal part of clothing purchases and our clothes were made with tailoring as an expectation.

Usually the vibe is that that his lack of social decorum is because he doesn’t know how to use manners, but I also think he just thinks he doesn’t really have to. By not using them he’d also be bad at them of course, but it’s possible he believes one should be so flattered by his attention that he doesn't really have to try to make any particular social effort, and thus has a few stock phrases to use to throw someone a bone, as it were.

suicide baiting (often machine translated into other languages)

asking you to mail them your work with a promise of payment

As always, please be cautious if something in the comments seems untrue or strange, and follow internet safety best practices.

"A marriage ending isn't a failure at all. I spent eleven years with her. We were so in love that we couldn't image life apart from each other. We got our own place, adopted a dog, and supported each other through school. I thought if tow people loved each other enough the rest would fall into place, except... love isn't everything.

And I didn't want to believe that, but we were sitting in counseling one day, talking about our future and I realized we were describing two completely different lives. Where we'd live, what kind of life we wanted, what made us happy. And it hit me that- I love this woman and this woman loved me. And after eleven years of loss, grief, career changes, we were so deeply in love... but we weren't aligned. And I kept thinking 'We just need to try harder. We can find some compromise to make this work,' because that's what you're supposed to do when you love someone, right?

But the reality was, we had just become different people. Her trade school took her in one direction, my graduate degree in another and trying to force us back into who we were five years ago wasn't coming from a place of love. It was coming from a place of fear. Fear that, if this ended, it meant we wasted eleven years. But sitting there across from her, I realized: That's not how love works.

Those eleven years happened. They were real. The dog, our home, showing up for each other through grad school and trade school. I wouldn't change a single thing because loving someone doesn't mean you're meant to stay with them forever. And letting go doesn't erase what you had. We measure marriage by whether it lasts forever or not, but what if we measured it by whether it mattered?

What if we measured it by the love we gave, the life we built, and the people we became? Because love's job isn't to last forever, it's to help you become fully completely yourself, and sometimes the most loving thing you can do is give each other permission to be yourselves, separately. But the dog doesn't know were' divorced. He just gets two Christmases now."

It’s the way Wentworth talks to Mrs. Musgrove about her dead son. He knows better than anyone that Dick Musgrove was a useless good-for-nothing, that it was a piece of “good fortune” for his family “to lose him before he reached his twentieth year.” His first reaction to Mrs. Musgrove talking about “poor Richard” to him is to laugh inwardly–but. Instead of laughing at her, he goes over and sits next to Mrs. Musgrove and speaks to her so kindly and patiently–“with so much sympathy and natural grace, as shewed the kindest consideration for all that was real and unabsurd in the parent’s feelings.”

Austen goes on for two paragraphs about how ridiculous Mrs. Musgrove looks while lamenting over her idiot son, and the entire time, Wentworth is keeping a completely straight face, focusing only on the fact that this woman is sincerely upset and he can relieve her feelings a little by showing compassion.