Large Is a Guess

A guy messaged me last week asking if a large would fit his son. I get some version of that question almost every day, and the honest answer is always the same: I don't know, not from the word large by itself. Large on one shirt is a 42 chest. Large on another is a 46. The tag is a starting point, nothing more.

Nobody tells you that when you start buying clothes, secondhand or otherwise. A size is just a label a brand picked, sometimes decades ago, sometimes last year, sometimes by a completely different standard than the brand sitting right next to it on the rack. Vintage runs small more often than not. Some newer labels run big on purpose, to make people feel good about the number on the tag. None of it lines up, and pretending it does is how you end up with a closet full of things you never wear.

So I measure. Every piece that comes through here gets laid flat and measured by hand before it goes up for sale. Pit to pit, shoulder seam to shoulder seam, collar to hem, whatever matters for that particular item. I keep an actual notebook for it, because there is no way I am holding six different sets of measurements in my head for six different shirts in a single week.

Today it's a navy button-up from Coastal Clothing, short sleeve, a small white micro-dot print that photographs flatter than it looks in person. Tagged Large. I measured it anyway, because a tag saying Large and a shirt fitting like a Large are two separate claims, and only one of them is something I can actually promise you.

It sounds small. It isn't, not when you're buying a one-of-a-kind piece from a photo and a stranger's word, with no rack to walk up to and nothing in a backup size waiting if this one's wrong. One-of-a-kind cuts both directions. It means you found something nobody else has. It also means if it doesn't fit, it's gone. There's no exchange rack for the same shirt one size up.

So the measurements carry weight a fitting room usually would. A chest number. A length. A sleeve, when I can get a tape around it cleanly. If something runs a little long or a little tight for its size, I'll say which way it leans. It takes longer to list things this way. I do it anyway, every time.

Every person who buys from this shop is trusting a number I wrote down by hand. I don't take that lightly. Respect, around here, is mostly small and unglamorous, and a lot of the time it just looks like telling you the truth about how something fits before you spend your money on it.

Choose to be kind. Choose to be grateful. Choose to be happy.

— Nina of GiaNina Collective