Archetype: News: New York Times

	New York Times

11-26-2002

The Death of Small, Medium and Large
By MARIA RUSSO

hen Lands' End, Middle America's favorite mail-order haberdasher, introduced a custom-fit-chinos service last year, the company expected its appeal to be narrow: heavy people, very short people, the fussy few who demanded perfectly fitted casual clothing. But the service has caught on beyond Lands' End's greatest expectations, and this year the company extended its custom-sizing service from men's and women's pants to men's dress shirts. In so doing, the retailer has begun to rewrite the rules of American casual dress.

The Lands' End process is managed online. Instead of a well-mannered tailor discreetly judging the side to which a gentleman ''dresses,'' an online form asks for measurements and follows up with blunt queries like ''The shape of my seat is best described as. . . . '' (The choices are flat, average, prominent/high and full/wide.) Customers' responses are stored in a sort of bespoke database. All this for folks who probably have never shopped on Savile Row.

Levi's is getting in the game, too, with an online space dedicated to ''engineered'' dungarees. Meanwhile, in the real world, Brooks Brothers has set aside part of its New York store for ''digital tailoring'' -- computer body mapping, for a true precision fit. We've had it, it seems, with the notion that all bodies should be grouped into broad categories. Whether you're twiggy or schlumpy, you can cut exactly the silhouette you want for less than a hundred bucks.

All this represents a turn away from the classic S, M, L system that first allowed department stores to sell mass quantities of clothing. It's also a break from a tenet of American style: namely, that the fit of your clothes is supposed to be a little off. The old system had an implied ethic, for men in particular: we're too busy defeating Communism in our (aptly named) sack suits to worry like French fops over how well our trousers hug our buttocks. Shouldn't Americans prefer their shirts oversize, the better to wear them, casual-Friday style, as ersatz jackets? Mustn't the cuffs of chinos scuff the pavement a touch, the better to fray and thereby transmit American insouciance? Superbaggy hip-hop wear, of course, took this disregard for ''proper'' fit to its sartorial limit.

Those days may soon be gone. How long will it be before every dowdy dad with an S.U.V. owns a wardrobe so sharply shaped it would make a Milanese dandy look twice?

	What We Do Who We Are What We've Done Where To Find Us News