"At the moment, a woman's dress size 12 is a 38 in Germany, Netherlands and France, a 40 in Belgium, a 44 in Italy and a 46 in Portugal and Spain. It gives you an instant headache," says Steve Tyler, spokesman for the BSI. The idea is that every garment would be labelled with a pictogram - a metric matchstick man. Women would have to know their bust size in centimetres, and men their collar and inside leg, which could just be the start of another headache. Harmony, as Britain's so-called metric martyrs - the shopkeepers who were penalised for selling bananas by the pound - know to their cost could be many years away.

What is here today is another spin-off of body-scanning. The current buzz word in fashion is mass customisation. A phrase borrowed from the car industry, it sounds like a contradiction in terms - delivering something personal to everyone - but it simply means using the latest technology to create a one-off garment that fits the customer perfectly.

The shop of the future works like this. You walk into Prada or Topshop. You step into one of their body-scanning cubicles and your 3-D image is encrypted onto your personalised credit card or smart card. You sit in an armchair with a personal shopper and choose a few items from the shop's range - a jacket, a shirt and trousers. Using virtual-reality software, you can see yourself - your digital twin - in those clothes. You can add accessories, change your hair colour, parade up and down a virtual catwalk and give yourself a twirl. If you like the results, the assistant presses a button and your digital body map is transferred to the factory where a laser-cutting machine reads the software and alters the pattern to fit you. In a few days, your jacket, shirt and trousers are couriered to you. They fit. Welcome to the world of e-couture.

The concept is so new that the industry has yet to hit upon a user-friendly word. But you must admit that anything is better than mass customisation, with its communist overtones. Some call it demi-couture (couture, in its correct French sense, means hand-sewn); others, e-tailoring.

Digital tailoring, meanwhile, is on offer at Brooks Brothers' flagship store on Madison Avenue in New York, where Wall Street types are happy to find a 12-second window in their schedules to be measured up. Pioneered in November, the shop has built up a bank of satisfied customers who can order suits and shirts, made to measure, without leaving their desks. The process is fully automated - "no human hand", boasts a spokesman - and orders are delivered within 15 days. So successful has the pilot scheme been that the company plans to extend it to a further 10 shops and offer it to women. Prices are well below traditional made-to-measure suits; a digitally tailored outfit starts at £495; handmade costs more than £710.