The UK is to start a national sizing survey in partnership with academe and industry

Citation

Stylios, G.K. (2001), "The UK is to start a national sizing survey in partnership with academe and industry", International Journal of Clothing Science and Technology, Vol. 13 No. 5. https://doi.org/10.1108/ijcst.2001.05813eaa.001

The UK is to start a national sizing survey in partnership with academe and industry

The UK is to start a national sizing survey in partnership with academe and industry

It is important to see that agreement has now been reached and that a new UK survey, long overdue, will now be done. The current data was gathered many decades ago and it does not represent the current UK's population.

The survey, given the acronym Size UK, is the result of a collaborative project which has brought forward the issues of size accuracy data and quantified to some extent the demand in terms of lack of consistency in the fitting of garments. What the study has not done is of course to produce a meaningful means of determining people's size and shape, and hence the result was to buy a scanner developed in the USA by TC² in North Carolina. The system is to be installed at specific locations around the country, and academic institutions participating in this venture are to measure by the scanner as well as manually a representative sample of the population in each area across the whole of the UK.

The reasoning behind the decision to use the TC² scanner and not the Cyberware or indeed any other technique is not yet known, but the research community hopes that the scanner will enable shape data to be acquired, including face, hands and feet, which will be important and necessary for future commercial as well as research work.

The surveying regions are as follows:

• •

  London and the South (Region 1);

• •

  Central England and Wales (Region 2);

• •

  Leeds, Manchester and Edinburgh (Region 3).

The following academic institutions are to be involved with the survey itself:

• •

  London College of Fashion;

• •

  Southampton Institute;

• •

  University of Wales Institute;

• •

  University of Central England;

• •

  Nottingham Trent University;

• •

  Heriot Watt University;

• •

  Manchester Metropolitan University;

• •

  Leeds College of Art and Design.

It is expected that each survey centre will measure over 1,000 people, split equally between men and women. The staff needed for each survey centre at any one time is said to be 15 and the duration of the proceedings for each survey region four to five weeks. Children are to be excluded from this round.

There are technical issues that may emerge from the selection of the particular scanner, or perhaps questions as to whether newly emerged remote on-line measurement techniques have been considered (see G.K. Stylios et al., in IJCST Vol. 13 No. 1, 2001, pp. 65-76), "A remote on-line 3-D human measurement and reconstruction approach for virtual wearer trials in global retailing". I guess that although those arguments maybe legitimate, the overriding factor by a long way is that a sizing survey needed to be done and that we should be supportive of it. The more up to date data that this survey will be producing is for the benefit of academic research and commercial enterprise. IJCST hopes to report on the outcome of this sizing survey, its technical issues and the challenges that it will provide.

George K. Stylios