H&M Is Back Under Fire for Their Outrageous Sizing

Trips to the dressing room are certainly not our favorite part of shopping, but at H&M, they're downright harrowing (when was the last time you didn't have to bring half a dozen sizes of the same item in with you?). One UK-based woman is speaking out after feeling fed up with the retailer's confounding and misleading size standards, and her post is going viral for taking the brand to task.

Shopper Lowri Byrne clapped back at H&M via their Facebook page last week after discovering that she (normally a UK size 12) couldn't even fit into a UK size 16 in the retailer's surreal system of sizing. As Byrne pointed out in her post, "Not only was this annoying because I wanted to buy this dress, but so many women take what size dress they buy to heart. If I was one of these girls (thankfully I'm not) requesting a size 18 dress would seriously devastate me!"

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Byrne makes a good point. In this culture of super-skinny celebrities and unrealistic photo retouching on everything from personal Instagram posts to the fashion glossies, young women are faced with more pressure than ever to conform to an unnatural standard of beauty. With H&M remaining one of the most popular retailers in the country for fast fashion, their perspective on sizing isn't just business—it contributes to the culture. Because of its prevalence in cities across America (and indeed, as this post points out, around the world) H&M would likely be one of the first retailers young women visit when starting to shop on their own. The fact that this store is able to capture customers from an early age—and continue to cater to them through adulthood—makes its chosen method of sizing all the more influential to those beginning to navigate a weight-obsessed culture.

Instead of offering a rational, easy-to-understand sizing system to impressionable customers, H&M sticks with its draconian sizing and even defends it. When asked about Byrne's post, an H&M rep stated, "It is only ever our intention to design and make clothes that make our customers feel good about themselves, any other outcome is neither intended nor desired. H&M's sizes are global and the sizes offered in the U.K. are the same in all the 66 markets in which we operate in and online. As there is no global mandatory sizing standard, sizes will differ between brands and different markets. Our dedicated, in-house sizing department works according to an average of the sizes and measurements suggested by the markets we operate in." This non-apology apology seems to insist that there's nothing amiss in the brand's sizing—something that flies in the face of the nearly 600 sympathetic comments from other like-minded women on Byrne's Facebook post.

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It is, to say the least, a huge missed opportunity that H&M refuses to engage in responsible sizing. As a well-known, successful presence on the retail scene, it's unlikely that adjusting their sizing would have any negative impact on their market (in fact, if the success of "vanity sizing" is to be trusted, it could be quite the opposite). If H&M did decide to standardize their sizing to more accurately reflect the market, it would be (at minimum) a statement to the young women of the world that their bodies are acceptable no matter what number they're assigned.

As another unhappy shopper (who also happens to be a teen counsellor) implored, "STOP telling my girls that a size 4 is the 'ideal body size' and the 'epitome of beauty' if you're going to change a size 4 into an 8 or a 12 or whatever number you feel like on any given day."

To her point, body image issues are prevalent enough without most women feeling that they're an "abnormal" size at the insistence of H&M.

Put another way: H&M, this is your opportunity to do the right thing, to potentially positively influence even the most insecure and self-critical female population, to promote a culture of acceptance and self-love in a low-cost, low-risk way. Given that chance, why wouldn't you?

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