The weekly paper of clothing, fit and machine learning
Short definitional notes on the terms that recur across the beats, kept compact and set apart from the week’s reporting.
The deliberate room drafted into a garment over the body measurement, so the wearer can move, breathe and get dressed. It is a design decision and is rarely published in a chart.
Expanding or contracting a base pattern by fixed increments to produce a range of sizes. Every dimension moves together, which is why unusual proportions fall between sizes.
Two different measurements taken at two different points and frequently treated as one column. A chart that does not say which it holds cannot be safely compared with another.
A figure from a standard test in which a circular sample is supported at its centre; the ratio of the shadow area to the flat disc area describes how fluidly a cloth falls.
A garment cut at forty-five degrees to the weave, which allows the cloth to shear and follow the body. Bias-cut pieces behave quite unlike the same pattern cut on the grain.
Two cloths that match under one light source and visibly differ under another, because their reflectance spectra differ while integrating to the same response.
A learned estimate of a joint position, trained on human annotation. It describes posture reliably and is not the bony landmark a tailor measures from.
A mesh whose shape is set by a small number of parameters learned from a measured population. It can only express shapes that population contained.
A physical object of known size placed in the plane of the garment. Without one, a photograph carries no absolute dimension and every length is an inference about distance.