A size letter means nothing until you read the table

Clothing sizes in the United States have no legal definition. The old voluntary standard, PS 42-70, was withdrawn in 1983 and nothing replaced it. A medium is whatever the company cutting it decided a medium would be, and there is no authority any of us answered to.

You see the result as soon as you line up our own tables side by side. Our lounge pants chart M at a 24.1 to 24.9 inch waist. Our cozy joggers chart M at 25.5 to 26.5. Our flowy wide leg goes to 30, and our ruffle capris to 31. Same letter, nearly seven inches of spread, all of it ours.

None of those four is wrong. They are different clothes drafted from different blocks, and the letter was never carrying that information. Pretending otherwise would only cost you a return.

So read the column, not the letter

Every piece with a table gives you the actual number. Find your waist measurement, run down the waist column, and take the size whose band contains it. That takes fifteen seconds and it is the only step that carries any information.

What makes this tedious is repetition. Doing it once is fine. Doing it across the 51 pages the fit finder reads, tab by tab, is the reason people give up and click the letter they usually buy. That is the job the fit finder does: same fifteen seconds, applied to all of them at once.

The letters still matter for ordering

You cannot order 27 inches. Amazon wants a letter, so you translate back at the end. The table is the dictionary, not the destination.

When there is no table at all

Four of our 78 pages went up without one. We say so on those pages rather than leaving a blank where a table should be. There is still a way through, though: all four are single colourways of cuts whose other colours are charted, so the table is one click away on a sibling page. Same pattern, different dye.