An improved clothing size recommendation approach based on subdivision of female body types

Abstract

With the rapid development of clothing online shopping, customers have a higher demand for more accurate clothing size recommendation systems. The work this paper presented is compatible with the four body types specified in the Chinese standard. Then, the subdivision was performed where each of the major body types corresponded to four characteristic indices. In addition, each characteristic index had three attributes. Therefore, the female body can be subdivided into 81 types for each major type. Subsequently, this paper suggests an improved clothing size recommendation system that considers subdivided body types. The recommendation criteria in the approach were refined by a pressure distribution analysis through a virtual fitting simulation. Finally, case studies were conducted on customers of body type A (accounting for 52.73% of bodies) to demonstrate the procedures of the proposed approach.

Practitioner summary: This study proposes an improved clothing size recommendation approach based on the subdivision of code-specified female body types. Compared with existing clothing size recommendations, the proposed approach can help customers find formfitting sizes more accurately.

Keywords:

• Body type classification
• size designation of clothing
• virtual fitting
• pressure distribution analysis

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to acknowledge the Aimer Human Engineering Research Centre at the Beijing Institute of Fashion Technology for providing the data used in this study. Additionally, the authors appreciate Dr. Shu, Zhan for his extensive support in improving the language and quality of the paper.

Disclosure statement

The authors have no potential conflict of interest.

Additional information

Funding

This work is supported by the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (2232020 E-06, 2232020 D-45), the Arts & Humanities Research Council of the UK (AH/T011483/1), and the Shanghai style fashion design and value creation knowledge service centre (ZX201311000031).