You know your size at retail because you have been trained by a few brands over a few years. That training does not transfer. A replica's size label is a printed character on a woven tag; it is not the output of a fit process, and nothing obliges the factory that cut the pattern to agree with the house that designed the original.
This page is about how to stop relying on that character.
What a size label is, on this side of the market
At retail, a size letter is the end of a chain: a brand picks a fit model, drafts a base pattern, grades it up and down, then samples and adjusts. The letter is a handle on that process. It still drifts between brands and between seasons, which is why you already own a medium that fits like a large.
A replica reproduces the finished object, not the process. The factory works from the garment, from photographs, or from a tech pack of unknown provenance, and it prints whatever size run its own pattern was graded to. Two workshops copying the same jacket can both be honest and still hand you two different mediums.
So the letter survives the copy. The calibration behind it does not.
What the charts on this site actually show
We hold 57 seller size charts, extracted from the images a seller published beside their items. They are all from one store, MVT, and that is a real limit on what follows — one seller is not a market. But it is 57 charts from a single consistent source, which makes it a clean test of whether one store's sizing is internally stable.
It is not.
Forty-eight of those charts also print the seller's own height and weight guide. Take one body from it: 178cm and 60kg. Across the charts that mention exactly that body, the seller recommends XS on nine items, S on fourteen, and XXS on seven, plus a handful of numeric sizes. Same store, same body, three or more different letters depending on which album you are standing in.
That is not the seller being careless. It is the seller being accurate: an oversized shell and a slim knit that fit the same person cannot both be called S without one of them lying. It does mean any sentence beginning "I'm a medium at this seller" is describing an item, not a store.
Size from the numbers instead
The workable method is dull and it works.
- Pick a garment you already own that fits the way you want the new one to fit. Not your size — that specific garment.
- Lay it flat and measure it. Chest, shoulder, sleeve, length, and for trousers waist, hip and leg opening. How to measure a garment you already own walks through each one.
- Open the seller's chart for the exact item you are buying, not a chart from their other albums.
- Match on the measurements that decide the fit for that garment type, and accept that the others will land where they land.
- If the chart is ambiguous — and most are — ask the seller or your agent to measure the actual piece before it ships.
Step five is the one people skip. It is also the only step that turns a published table into a measured object.
The tolerance is printed on the chart
Fifty-one of the 57 charts we hold name a one-to-three-centimetre margin of error on manual measurement, and all but one of the rest carry some caveat of their own about the measuring. Take that at face value. If two sizes on a chart are three centimetres apart in the chest and the chart itself admits three centimetres of slop, the chart cannot decide between them for you.
That is not a reason to distrust the seller. It is a reason to stop treating a table as a promise, and to weight your decision toward the dimension with the largest gap between sizes.
What this does not tell you
These 57 charts do not state their measuring convention. Not one says whether a chest figure is measured flat across the garment or all the way around it. The extracted field labelled "chest" runs from 46 to 172 across the set, which is only possible if both conventions are present, unlabelled, in the same store. Reading a Chinese size chart is about surviving that specifically.
We also hold no footwear charts at all — every measurement field in the set is an apparel field. Nothing on this page is evidence about shoes.
And we have not bought and measured any of these garments ourselves. What we hold is the seller's published numbers and the seller's published caveat, linked back to the image they came from. That is a record of what was claimed, not a verification that the claim held.
If you are ordering for the first time, read how to buy reps first, and plan to check measurements again at the QC stage, when there is a physical object to measure rather than a table to interpret.