There was a bit of a rumpus recently about certain fashion retailers starting to charge a fee for returning clothes bought online, which on the one hand doesn’t seem outrageous (I know there are customers out there that buy heaps of stuff as if they’re in a changing room and return what they don’t want), but on the other hand is a bit of a swindle when you never quite know what you’re getting when purchasing online.

And this post on the BBC about the added complexity of the fact that women’s clothes sizes are absolute nonsense really caught my attention. In this case, there’s a customer who bought the exact same pair of trousers in two different colours only to find they were completely different sizes and fits.

Women’s clothing sizes have always been unreliable at best, and across different shops you can expect to fall anywhere on the range of random size numbers regardless of what you are elsewhere. I hadn’t realised, as I don’t shop in H&M, that it was quite such a problem within the same stores as well but it doesn’t surprise me at all.

It seems like such an odd problem to linger, when there is such an easy solution out there that has been around for thousands of years - actual measurements?? Granted you’ll fall straight into the trap of inches versus centimetres, but at least those are actual genuine sizes rather than running the gamut of 10, 12, 14, 16, who knows?

When you add this extra element of gamble that you take when ordering online, it does seem far less reasonable for a store to charge you to return something. Perhaps it’s an effort to prop up the high street stores but people will always go for the most convenient option and ultimately I don’t think a small return fee will stop them buying online, it may just stop them buying so much, which feels like a lose-lose situation for the brands.

H&M, in particular, have positioned their returns fee as doing their bit for the environment which is a reasonable argument except it opens up the doors to enter the fast fashion debate. Who knows what the future of fashion looks like, but I do believe it will continue to involve a lot of shopping from home.