Fashion

Can technology fix fashion’s sizing crisis?

A pair of jeans could easily be a size 10 by one brand and a size 14 in another, leaving customers confused and disheartened.

It has led to a global deluge of returns, costing fashion retailers an estimated £190bn a year as would-be shoppers wonder what size they’re meant to buy from which store.

I didn’t have to look far to find people experiencing the problem.

“I don’t trust high-street sizing,” one person tells me, as she browses one of London’s popular shopping streets. “To be honest, I buy by how it looks rather than the actual size.”

She’s one of many women who often orders multiple versions of the same item to find one that fits, before sending the rest back, fuelling a culture of mass returns.

A new generation of sizing tech

A growing cluster of tech companies are now attempting to fix the problem.

Tools such as 3DLook, True Fit and EasySize focus on helping customers choose the right size at checkout, using body scans via smartphone photos to suggest the most accurate fit.

Meanwhile, virtual fitting-room platforms including Google’s virtual try-on, Doji, Alta, Novus, DRESSX Agent and WEARFITS allow shoppers to create digital avatars and preview how items might look. These systems aim to increase confidence when buying online.

More recently, AI-powered shopping agents have begun entering the market too. Daydream, allows users to describe what they are looking for and then recommends options.

OneOff pulls together looks from celebrities to find similar items, while Phia scans tens of thousands of websites to compare prices and surface early “size insights.”

While these tools work at the e-commerce stage, a new UK start-up, Fit Collective, is taking a different approach: trying to prevent the problem earlier in the production process.

Founder Phoebe Gormley argues AI can potentially fix the sizing before clothes reach the stores.

The 31-year-old – who is no data scientist, rather a tailor – previously launched Savile Row’s first female tailors, making made-to-measure garments for a range of women.

“They would all come in and say, ‘high-street sizing is so bad’,” she tells me.

She says fashion’s current model is a “downward spiral” where brands make cheaper garments to offset huge return rates, which leads to unhappy customers and more waste.

Since launching last year, Fit Collective has raised £3 million in pre-seed funding, reportedly the largest amount ever secured by a solo female founder in the UK.

“As far as we know, we are the first solution comparing all the manufacturing data and the commercial data,” she says.

Phoebe’s new venture uses machine learning to analyse a range of data – including returns, sales figures and customer emails – to really understand why something didn’t fit.

It then turns this into clear advice for design and production teams, who can adjust patterns, sizing and materials before manufacturing begins.

Her system may tell a firm, for example, to take a few centimetres off the length of an item of clothing to reduce the number of returns overall. This saves money for the company and time for the consumer.

While many in the industry welcome such tools, some warn technology alone won’t fix fashion’s sizing problem.

“People aren’t mannequins, they’re unique, and so are their fit preferences,” says Paul Alger, Director of International Business at the UK Fashion and Textile Association.

He warns sizing can be nuanced, with body measurements rarely aligning with a number on a label.

“It’s very difficult, it’s very subjective,” he says.

“Most of us are a different shape and size – around the world people have different body shapes.”

And then there’s the issue of vanity sizing – or “emotional sizing” according to Mr Alger – where a brand will deliberately choose to create a more generous fit in the knowledge that a consumer, especially in women’s wear, will prefer to shop there.

“Once these sizing norms are established in a collection, brands will usually refer back to them each season so they are effectively creating their own brand sizing,” he says.

Sophie De Salis, sustainability policy adviser at the British Retail Consortium, says retailers are increasingly aware of the issue, from a cost-saving and sustainability perspective.

“Smarter sizing tech and AI-driven solutions are key to reducing returns and supporting the industry’s sustainability goals. BRC members are working with innovative tech providers to help their customers buy the most suitable size and reduce returns,” she says.

With returns now a board room issue and sustainability pressures mounting, more fashion houses may well consider data-driven design.

While no single solution is likely to solve inconsistent sizing completely, the emergence of tools like Fit Collective, alongside a growing ecosystem of virtual try-ons and size-prediction platforms, suggests the industry is beginning to shift.

CNN

Fashion

“I absolutely want it”: why is this Chanel jacket causing a social media frenzy?

After the rain comes the beautiful… garment. On November 3rd, British influencer Amelia Liana, with half a million followers, posted a photo carousel of her latest look. Photographed on a London street, she poses in a short , beige trench coat that is almost entirely wet. On the damp patches of the fabric, several interlocking “C”s—the iconic Chanel logo — appear to magically emerge. “After the rain comes the Chanel CCs {the logos appear when wet},” the content creator captioned the post, which received over 11,000 likes.

This caused quite a stir among her followers: “I’m obsessed with this jacket,” “It’s so cool,” “Everything I was waiting for, amazing,” “I don’t need it, and yet I absolutely want it,” several users posted in the comments section. But it was especially on the influencer’s TikTok account , where she has over 690,000 followers, that the garment was the biggest hit.

Underneath a “test” video, we learn that the content creator actually had fun wetting her jacket with a friend using a water bottle . This caused the Chanel logos to appear in seconds, sending her followers into a frenzy: “Where can I buy it? What should I look for? Oh my God,” “Okay, now I want one,” “I absolutely need this jacket,” “I have to admit, it’s really amazing.”

A jacket that’s more scientific than magical. Taken from Chanel’s Coco Neige 2025-2026 collection —these sophisticated and technical collections unveiled annually since 2018 and entirely dedicated to winter sports—this short trench coat, crafted from cotton and silk faille, was created using a “hydrophobic” printing system, meaning it reacts to water. When the garment gets wet, the double C motif of the House of Chanel on Rue Cambon is revealed.

The garment is a prime example of Chanel’s commitment to innovative fashion. After experimenting with 3D printing in haute couture for its Fall/Winter 2015-2016 collection, the brand founded by Gabrielle Chanel is now exploring technical clothing. “While the collection incorporates Chanel’s iconic codes and emphasizes functionality, it also reveals an unexpected sense of freedom. What appeals to me is that it transcends stereotypes: it adapts just as naturally to the ski slopes as it does to the city,” explained Nana Komatsu, the face of the Coco Neige 2025-2026 collection, in a press release. This quality quickly went viral on social media, making it the must-have jacket of the winter.

MADAME FIGARO

Fashion

Stolen treasures, a crown dropped as thieves fled – and serious questions for Louvre security

It is the most spectacular robbery at the Louvre museum since the Mona Lisa disappeared in 1911.

And it poses serious questions about levels of security covering French artworks, at a time when they are increasingly being targeted by criminal gangs.

According to France’s new interior minister Laurent Nuñez, the gang that broke into the Apollo Gallery on Sunday morning was clearly professional.

They knew what they wanted, had evidently “cased the joint” in advance, had a brazenly simple but effective modus operandi, and needed no more than seven minutes to take their booty and get away.

In a truck equipped with an elevating platform of the type used by removal companies, they parked on the street outside, raised themselves up to the first floor, then used a disc-cutter to enter through a window.

Inside the richly decorated gallery they made for two display-cases which contain what remains of the French crown jewels.

Most of France’s royal regalia was lost or sold after the 1789 Revolution, but some items were saved or bought back. Most of what was in the cases, though, dates from the 19th Century and the two imperial families of Napoleon and his nephew Napoleon III.

According to the authorities, eight items were taken including diadems, necklaces, ear-rings and brooches.

They had belonged to Napoleon’s wife the empress Marie-Louise; to his sister-in-law Queen Hortense of Holland; to Queen Marie-Amelie, wife of France’s last King Louis-Philippe, who ruled from 1830 to 1848; and to the empress Eugénie, wife of Napoleon III, who ruled from 1852 to 1870.

A crown of the empress Eugénie was also taken, but was recovered damaged near the museum after the thieves seemingly dropped it.

In a statement the culture ministry said that the alarms had sounded correctly. Five museum staff who were in the gallery or nearby followed protocol by contacting security forces and protecting visitors.

It said the gang had tried to set fire to their vehicle outside but were prevented by the intervention of a museum staff-member.

The heist took place in a gallery just a short walk from some of the world’s most famous paintings – such as the Mona Lisa.

But the criminal groups that order heists like this do not target world-famous paintings that cannot ever be displayed or sold. They prefer items that can be converted into cash – and jewels top the list.

However huge their historical and cultural value, crowns and diadems can easily be broken apart and sold in bits. Even large and famous diamonds can be cut. The final sales price might not be what the original artefact was worth, but it will still be considerable.

Two recent museum thefts in France had already alerted the authorities to the growing audacity of art gangs, and a security plan drawn up by the culture ministry is gradually being put into effect across France.

“We are well aware that French museums are vulnerable,” said Nuñez.

In September thieves took raw gold – in its mineral state – from the Natural History Museum in Paris. The gold was worth about €600,000 (£520,000) and will have been easily disposed of on the black market.

In the same month thieves took porcelain worth €6m from a museum in Limoges – a city once famous for its chinaware. The haul could well have been commissioned by a foreign buyer.

The Louvre contains thousands of artworks that are famous around the world, and an equal number of more obscure items that are nonetheless culturally significant.

But in its 230-year history there have been relatively few thefts – largely thanks to the tight security in place.

The most recent disappearance was of a landscape by the 19th Century artist Camille Corot. Le Chemin de Sèvres (The Road to Sèvres) was simply removed from a wall in 1998 when no-one was looking, and has not been seen since.

But by far the most famous theft was the one that took place in 1911, when Leonardo da Vinci’s La Joconde – better known now as the Mona Lisa – was taken. The culprit back then hid in a closet overnight, then was able to remove the painting from its frame, wrap it up in his smock, tuck it under his arm and walk out.

It turned out he was an Italian nationalist who wanted the artwork brought back home. It was found in Italy in 1914 and returned to the Louvre.

Unless they have a quick success in catching the thieves, today’s investigators are unlikely to be so lucky.

The first aim of the gang will be to disperse the jewels and sell them on. It will not be hard.