A review of research and innovation in garment sizing, prototyping and fitting

Achieving well fitting garments matters to consumers and, therefore, to product development teams, garment manufacturers and fashion retailers when creating clothing that fits and functions both for individuals and for a retailer's target populations. New tools and software for body scanning and product development enhance the ways that sizing and fitting can be addressed; they provide improved methods for classifying and analysing the human body and new ways of garment prototyping through virtual product development. Recent technological developments place a growing demand on product development teams to reconsider their approach to prototyping, sizing and fitting. Significant, related changes are also being made in the fashion retail environment, including innovations in virtual fit to enable consumers to engage with fit online. For best effect in the short term, such advances need to relate well to existing manufacturing practices and to the methods that have, over many years, become embedded by practitioners into the processes involved in clothing product development and those used for establishing garment fit. The high rate of technological advance, however, places an urgent need on practitioners to change; established principles of pattern theory need to be recognised explicitly and followed consistently, otherwise, new techniques for developing and assessing products will not be able to be fully exploited. Practitioners will be pressed to adopt more data-rational approaches to product development, including adopting engineering principles into the practice of clothing product development. For example, comparisons made between the traditional two-dimensional garment pattern and the three-dimensional environment accessible through 3-D body scanning technology, provide both the stimulus and the data required to support a re-examination of how the measurements required for clothing product development should be defined. This should be coupled with a more explicit recognition of ease as a factor requiring quantification within clothing engineering. New methods of categorising the body in terms of its form also allow recognition of the restrictions of proportional theories in pattern construction; they afford promising opportunities for advancing the practices of sizing and fitting in clothing product development.