Men of Lemmy, how old were you when you found out that bra cup sizes are not standardized in the slightest?

They aren't?

I'm sad I missed the days of girls wearing no bras. Must have been nice.

Well, today years old. Thanks.

Wut

Most of the bras that my girlfriend gets fits on her first try, although she does tend to prefer sister sizes over her real size. If your girlfriend is having issues with bras fitting, it might be worthwhile to read up on how bra sizes are actually calculated and do a measurement yourself. Funny enough, most girls don't seem to know how the bra size system works either and they just get their sizes through trial and error, which seems like what has happened here.

The letter by itself is fundamentally meaningless. A 32D is equivalent to a 34B! And most girls severely underestimate their actual size. What would colloquially be called a B or C is actually an E

I'm gay, so current age I guess

Men's clothing sizes are a little dumb sometimes but I can usually take a tape measure to my waist and correctly order pants. Your guess is as good as mine what the difference between "boot cut" and "relaxed fit" are, and I would swear T-shirt sizes have shrunk since I was a teenager. As in, I can compare a Medium I've had since the Dubya administration to an XL today. But getting fitted for a suit, they measure me in inches and the clothing is more or less sized in inches.

Women's clothing sizes have had two different ice pick lobotomies. Women come in a wider range of sizes and aspect ratios, women's clothing is pretty much universally designed to fit tighter, but on the rack they're given one meaningless size number. a 12 is bigger than a 10, who knows by how much, and there's nothing on the girl you can measure with a tape to get that number, and there is no standard here at all. Why they haven't revolted I have no idea.

There is a whole NPR episode on women sizing and history of sizing in general.

Eye opening how stupid it is
I would swear T-shirt sizes have shrunk since I was a teenager.

I thought that too, but it turns out I just got fat

Clothing sizing in general is just arcane at this point.

This. I mostly buy size S t-shirts, sometimes M, occassionally XS. I dont even care anymore.
- If the shirt isn't xl, I can't raise my hands without showing my belly.
  
  Also if the shirt is bigger than L, I'm swimming in it.
- I’m between a medium and a large. More often then not though, I need the shoulder width and arm length of a large, but the cut in the torso of a medium. Clothing manufacturers assume Americans scale horizontally as they scale vertically. This maybe true given our obesity crisis.

Just now

Today years old.

It's also the fact that cup size is not necessarily independent from band size, that's where the trick is. I used to think I'm an A with a high band size as I'm huge with no booba, like a 39A or something but those never fit that well.

According to ABraThatFits methodology I'm actually 36C, which somehow does fit and super well, though by common and dudebro methodology I'm most certainly more of an "A cup" if that makes sense.

It's because whatever maniac invented the sizing scheme decided that every letter represents 2 inches more around your body at the weirdest boobage point than just below it. What a bonkers system! A woman with 38B bras is 38 inches around at the band, and 40 inches around at the girls. Nonsense. The way dudes THINK it works makes so much more sense.
I’m a woman w

Teenager. I'm an artist. I was drawing some characters. Had to find some references.

Grade 9- girlfriend at the time was "blessed" so to speak. Learned e women have a much more difficult time finding bras and underwear that "work" than most men do.

The cup size SHOULD be the difference in inches between the circumference below the breast and circumference around the breast.

3" difference would be a C cup

5" would be DD.

Why they double up some letters and not others, I couldn't tell you. 🤷🏻‍♂️

My ex used to sell underwear.

Have her go and get fitted. Many women don't know what their band/cup size really is.

Also, IMO, women's pant sizes are where the real absurdity in sizes is.

Not much help to know what cup size you are if the bra companies are only pretending to be standardized
- Only knowing your cup size is not enough. You need to know the underbust size as well. A 32D and a 34C have cups with the same volume. Sure, there is still some variance but not as much as I thought before I learned that.
  
  Edit: This calculator and the community of the same name on the-site-that-shall-not-be-named helped me a lot in finding my actual bra size. Now my only problem is that almost no company here has more than two or three bras in that size...

No clothes shit in my country is standard so why would the bra's be?

This is the case with all clothing.

All is a strecht... But yeah once marketing took over that function, it got turned into whatever the fuck we got now in the US🤡

There are plenty of brands that follow mostly standard sizing, as I understand it. But popular brands in the US (like Victoria Secret) generally don’t.

I fell down the r/abrathatfits rabbit hole one day, years ago. It’s fascinating.

I once talked to my girlfriend about bra sizes and how much i don't understand them. Then we both googled bra sizes and how often women wear the wrong size and fit and all. It's a whole science behind it and it's quite interesting. Now, 10 years later i still often think: oh no, she wears a bra that doesn't fit right and probably doesn't even know it.
- Yup! “Oh, she should probably go down a band size and up a cup size” popped into my head one day and I laughed at the absurdity.
  
  I introduced my wife to the world of proper bra fit, because she’d never known any of it. No one taught her. Made me feel vaguely guilty of mansplaining, but it helped!

It was a long time ago that I realized that women’s clothing sizing was largely fiction. Trying to buy clothing for a girlfriend or (later) my wife based on the tag of something they already owned was an exercise in futility.

I just learned today since I've never been compelled to look up any sort of conversion chart, but I had a hunch because dress/pants sizes are all over the place. One brand's mostly-honest 12 is another brand's flattering 4, shit like that

I'm both fat and tall. None of my fucking clothes have consistent sizes that fit. I'm not the least bit surprised that the clothing industry's greatest minds were defeated by breasts.

This old.

I think this is filed in my head under "no two manufacturers' sizes are the same (even if they're supposed to be to a standard)", and "this is especially true of women's wear", so while I may have known about bra cup sizes specifically at some point in the past, I'm not sure I did at the time I arrived at this post, and yet am thoroughly unsurprised to (re)discover it.

I really want a law that requires clothing sizes to include actual measurements. And it's insane that I would have to specify that these measurements must be accurate, but the clothing industry has made lying about sizes the norm.

There shouldn't be anything preventing me from figuring out women's bra sizes with a tape measure aside from the fact that I don't know them and they probably don't want a stranger obsessively measuring their boobs.

I really want a law that requires clothing sizes to include actual measurements.

Men's pants are sized based on the number of inches around the waist and the inseam. The inseam is stupid because it ignores the height from the waist to the crotch so relaxed fitting jeans will have a shorter inseam than a regular fit. I'm sure it is because it was standardized when higher waisted jeans and overalls and that kind of stuff was popular.

But it doesn't matter any more because the waist sizes can be off by a few inches anyway. It was literal, then became kind of close. Not as bad as women's clothing, but it is brand specific depending on how hard they lean into vanity sizing.
- waist sizes matter less because theres at least a commonly used bandaid fix for it, a belt.
- Yet another reason why I don't wear pants.

It is well standardized around here.

Probably around 14 or something. For whatever reason, people will often name DD as a large bra size around here. It also doesn't exist in our bra size system. Some girl pointed out that non-sense at school.

@ThisIsAManWhoKnowsHowToGling I don't remember exactly, but I was well into adulthood.

Oh hey, a Mastodon user! Nice to see ya

My understanding is that some European countries have laws standardizing bra size.

Europe, my beloved...

This might go some ways to explaining why I've never known a woman who liked buying or wearing bras. I'm comfortable blaming the patriarchy, which can absolutely get fucked.