The most common sizing question in this hobby is asked about a store rather than about an item:
does mook fit tts and good quality?
u/Annual-Candy863, r/FashionReps, 23 August 2024
It is a reasonable question and it has no answer, not because the seller is evasive but because "the store" is not the thing that has a size. Every garment in it was graded separately. This page is about why, and about the one thing a store genuinely does stay consistent about.
One store, one letter, no width
We hold 57 charts from a single seller, MVT, published beside the items on the shelf. Twenty-three of them print a chest figure for a size S, and across those 23 rows the size S chest runs from 46 to 168 centimetres. Shoulder at S runs 43 to 79. Sleeve at S runs 23 to 74.
The seller's own body-to-size table says the same thing from the other direction. Forty-eight of the 57 charts include one. A body of 180cm and 75kg is assigned ten different size labels across those tables; a body of 178cm and 60kg gets eight.
None of that is carelessness. It is the correct output of a grading process applied to different garments. An oversized shell and a close-cut knit that suit the same person cannot both be called S unless one of them is lying about its shape.
Four things that change between two items in one store
The pattern was graded for that garment. A size run is generated by stepping one base pattern up and down. The base is the garment's own cut, so the letters describe positions on that garment's ladder, not on a store-wide one. Two ladders in the same shop need not start at the same height.
The card may describe the original rather than the item. A size chart can be reproduced from the brand being copied instead of measured on the piece in the box. Nothing on the card tells you which happened, and the two produce different numbers for the same letter.
The production run may not be the one the chart was made for. The same silhouette gets manufactured more than once, by more than one workshop, and the differences between those runs are the entire subject of batch language.
The fabric changes what the same pattern does. Eleven of the 57 charts name a composition — cotton, wool, polyester and linen blends all appear. Fifty carry the seller's own instruction to rinse jeans in cold water only, which is a shrinkage warning written by the person selling them.
On top of all four, the label system itself moves around inside this one store. That is covered separately and it is a symptom of the same thing rather than a separate problem.
What it looks like from the buyer's side
One order, one seller, one size letter, two garments:
techs from husky r goated but i feel like i should buy a hoodie that’s size down next time. i’m 186cm 84kg, bought all L set. the pants fit perfect, but the hoodie is too baggy.
u/Classic_Ad_1118, r/FashionReps, 2 July 2026
That is the whole mechanism in three sentences. Same buyer, same body, same store, same letter on both labels, and the two halves of a matching set landed differently. The trousers were graded off a trouser pattern and the hoodie off a hoodie pattern, and the letter L was never a promise that those two ladders lined up.
Read it as data about grading rather than about the seller. The record for that store, with the surrounding thread, is on its evidence page.
Charts that contradict themselves
Occasionally the inconsistency is inside a single card, and those are worth learning to spot because they are the cheapest error to catch.
One chart prints a shoulder row of 64, then 55, then 56 as sizes climb, while length grades 65, 66, 67 and sleeve grades 73, 74, 75. Every other field behaves and the shoulder runs backwards. Another prints a leg opening of 119 on its smallest size, then 58, 59.5 and 61 above it.
You do not need to diagnose these. You need one habit: read down each column, not across each row. A field that does not move in one direction, in consistent steps, is a field you cannot size on — whatever caused it.
The thing the store is consistent about
This is the part that gets missed, and it is genuinely useful.
The base measurement moves wildly between items. The step does not. Across all 33 lower-body charts, every one of the 95 adjacent size pairs steps the waist by exactly four centimetres. Not a median of four — four, in every pair, in every chart. On upper-body charts the steps are smaller and tighter: chest a median of two, shoulder two, sleeve one.
So a seller can be unpredictable about where a size run starts and completely predictable about how far apart its rungs are. That gives you one thing you can carry between items in the same store: not your size, but the size of a step. It also tells you in advance that being caught between two sizes on the waist is resolvable while being caught between two on the sleeve is not.
The working rule
- Size per item. Open the chart attached to the specific album you are buying from.
- Never carry a letter across. "I'm an L at this seller" is a statement about one garment you bought once.
- Do carry your own measurements across. They are the only quantity here that stays the same between items.
- Read each column for direction and step size before reading any row for a value.
- Ask for the piece to be measured at the warehouse before it ships. Reading QC photos covers how to ask.
Limits
Fifty-seven charts from one store is a narrow base for a claim about how stores behave, and nobody here has bought and re-measured any of these garments — we publish the seller's printed numbers with a link back to the image, for the reasons set out on the methodology page. The two quoted buyers above describe orders from two other stores entirely.
What the evidence supports is narrow and it is enough: within one catalogue, the same size letter demonstrably describes garments of very different dimensions, and the seller's own recommendation table says so before you open a second chart.