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Clothes sold in India haven't followed a standard size. Manufacturers often use data from American or British body size surveys and make their own tweaks. For a lot of Indians, this has felt like they don't wear the clothes, but rather the clothes wear them. A new government initiative has been trying to fix this. NPR's Omkar Khandekar reports from India's capital, New Delhi.
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OMKAR KHANDEKAR, BYLINE: Nishkaam Kaur runs a small, sustainable clothes business in New Delhi. One winter afternoon, we went to a shopping mall in her neighborhood where she gave me a crash course in fast fashion. The men's collection, she says, has a problem.
NISHKAAM KAUR: Everything is narrow.
KHANDEKAR: Most of them, she says, are built for a V-shaped man-bod - broad shoulders, narrow waist. And women's clothes - she says they are mostly for super skinny or hourglass figures.
KAUR: If an apple-shaped woman was to take this dress into the trial room, she would come out crying.
KHANDEKAR: Kaur says most Indian women just aren't that shape, and nor is she.
KAUR: When I went to a very big brand store three, four years ago, and I basically went to just purchase a pair of denims. That's when I realized that I tried different styles, different silhouettes of denims, and all of them had something or the other missing.
KHANDEKAR: At the time, Kaur blamed herself.
KAUR: I questioned my body. It's just me. You know, I've not been working out.
KHANDEKAR: But when she began her own clothing company, she realized she wasn't the problem. It was a design problem. That's because until recently, manufacturers here did not have standardized data of Indian body types. They all designed clothes differently. One brand's medium could be another's extra large.
NOOPUR ANAND: Garments should not tell you, I exist on your body. It should actually blend in you. Otherwise, you will keep going, oh, the skirt is a little too tight, let me just pull it a little up, let me pull it a little down.
KHANDEKAR: That's Noopur Anand, dean of the National Institute of Fashion Technology in New Delhi. She says a bad fit isn't just about aesthetics or functionality. It also has an economic cost. India's domestic apparel sector is worth more than $40 billion. But according to one major industry group, 30- to 40% of clothes sold on e-commerce platforms are returned because of size issues.
To fix this, the Indian government tasked Anand's institute to do a massive survey a few years ago. A team of designers and academics traveled across the country and studied more than 26,000 people. And the differences they found between a standard Western body and an Indian body were significant. This is Anand.
ANAND: Our women have rounder bicep. They have a rounder thigh, rounder calf. The men, on the other hand, are leaner on the hip, on the thigh, on the calf and on the bicep.
KHANDEKAR: Earlier this year, the team published INDIAsize, a set of charts that they say is the best approximation of the Indian body type. Anand says the data is also useful to design furniture and prosthetics for Indians. And while there are regional variations...
ANAND: On an average, our size sets cover 87% of the population, which is pretty good.
KHANDEKAR: Rahul Mehta, who heads the industry body Clothing Manufacturers Association of India, says he expects brands to start adopting the size charts in the next two years, but some have mixed feelings about the survey, like Rakhi Bhatnagar, a stylist who runs a popular Instagram channel on Indian wear. She says the idea that clothes should be standardized - that mainly started after India became a British colony in the 19th century. That's how she says Indians started wearing structured garments like shirts and trousers.
RAKHI BHATNAGAR: They wanted to mass produce things for profits and gains, which could not have been done with slower textiles and draping styles because they were all hand-loomed, slowly produced.
KHANDEKAR: Bhatnagar says, a lot of traditional clothes in India are size-inclusive, like a sari or a dhoti, which adapts to one's body as it changes. And it's also sustainable.
BHATNAGAR: On one hand, it's good that, you know, they have acknowledged Indian bodies do exist, and they are different than U.S. and U.K. bodies, but on the other hand, it's further going to fuel the already overflowing fast fashion industry.
KHANDEKAR: Nishkaam Kaur, who took us shopping, says, if done right, women would have a better chance of feeling amazing in their clothes and in their bodies.
KAUR: They would just look at themselves in the mirror, and they would be like, I am going to step out of this room, and I'm going to rock the world.
KHANDEKAR: Omkar Khandekar, NPR News, New Delhi.
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