Stuck between a size 10 and a 12? Try the new size 11 trousers

Fashion entrepreneur Joanna Dai is aiming to fill a gap in the market and helps Tamara Abraham find a comfortable, snug fit

When sales assistants ask me which size I’d like to try, I usually say that I’m a size 12. That’s the label inside most of my clothes – but the truth is that I’m actually somewhere between a 10 and 12. I choose a 12 because clothing tends to look better on me when it’s slightly too big rather than slightly too small.

This is fine if you work in fashion and other less formal industries, where you can get away with oversized clothes (we use the term “boyfriend fit”). It looks cool in an I-haven’t-triedtoo-hard way. In a corporate environment though, this could read as sloppy, which is not the best look when there’s an important deal on the boardroom table. But the alternative is trousers that are a bit too tight – no wonder many women prefer a midi dress; they’re much easier to buy.

Nobody understands this better than Joanna Dai, a California-born, London-based investment bankerturned-fashion entrepreneur, whose namesake brand Dai has launched trousers in a “magic size 11”, catering to those women who fall between her most popular sizes, 10 and 12.

Dai, whose label aims to fill a gap in the market for polished workwear with the comfort of activewear, has developed a following for her trousers in particular, with the straight-leg Power Move shape (£195, daiwear.com) accounting for 25 per cent of her overall sales. Even so, she found that “there were women who were still returning a 10 and a 12, because it wasn’t a perfect fit”.

She saw the same issue encountered by women in her office, too: “Our marketing director, Chantalle, would put on both and the 10 would be just a little bit too snug and the 12 would be just a little bit too baggy. So there was lots of different validating evidence around us… [We thought] let’s just run a size 11 and see if it truly is that magic size and if it solves a problem for a lot of women.”

I was a little sceptical, if only because one brand’s size 10 or size 12 can be radically different from another brand’s. Will this really cut through and make a difference?

For me, it did. It turns out that I am a perfect 11, in Dai’s black high-waisted trousers at least. They go on like a glove, make my legs look great (although I am wearing heels here) and the fabric has a nice stretch to it, but not so much that I look like I’m off to the gym.

It helps that Dai has spent the past seven years obsessing over the fit of women’s trousers. She’s been collecting data from her customers too, and found that 55 per cent of her customers are curvy, with an hourglass or pear shape. “Obviously, the top is different, but from the waist down, it’s quite a similar silhouette for both,” she says. And yet this is not the predominant silhouette that is catered to on the high street.

“When we started our size trials, we looked at the trouser fit of other brands who we thought we sat within the market, and I discovered that pretty much all of them cut to a column shape… Basically [they’re for a woman who has] no hips and no butt.” The result is that on curvy bodies, trousers will gape at the back or pull across the hips. So we just started developing it,” Dai says.

“The curvy version of the trousers has a narrower waist that comes in high, and then we added more room around the hips and thighs, and it fits so much better. And women feel so much more confident in this shape.”

Dai is not alone in offering a more specialised fit; Swedish brand Asket sells jeans which come in 54 different sizes, including curvy and straight fits. Critically, neither Dai nor Asket updates its offering each season; once they’ve nailed the fit, they can order a large quantity from their factories (benefiting from economies of scale) and remain confident that the product will be as appealing to shoppers in two years’ time as they are now.

This, along with in-between sizes like Dai’s 11, make trousers available in much more precise variables, more akin to bra sizing. If you think it sounds a little excessive, ask any woman who has spent time and money going to the tailor to take high street trousers in or up, and I’ll bet they will be keen on the idea of these in-between sizes.

Even with in-between sizes, there will be disparity in which ones will best fit an individual’s body. When you can find that in one shop you fit into a 10, another a 16, the size on the label is becoming almost irrelevant. Dai’s size 11 might be the equivalent to a large in Zara, a 10 in M&S and a 12 at Reiss.

So-called “vanity sizing” – in which retailers flatter their customers by making a dress size a fraction larger than it should be – is rife, perhaps inevitable given that the proportions of the average woman have changed significantly over the past 70 years. In 1957, the average British woman was 5ft 2in, with a 34B bra and a 28in waist. Today, she is 5ft 5in, with a 36DD bust and a 34in waist. “Women’s clothes sizes are essentially made up,” says my colleague Melissa Twigg, who explored the disparity in high street sizing last year. “Because there is no formal correspondence between what letter or number is on a label and actual measurements, brands are free to set them according to who they believe their target customer to be, hence a medium in Zara feeling a lot smaller than a medium in Marks & Spencer.”

Brands are trying to come up with solutions to this messy system. Hidden adjustable waistbands can be found on the high street at Cos, while Me + Em’s trousers include a waist adjusting buckle on the back, which looks like a design feature.

So, could we see other in-between sizes on Dai’s rails in the future too? “We are guided by the data,” Dai says. “I haven’t explored the potential target market for 13 versus committing to size 18, 20 and beyond, which is another [key sizing] segment.

“Maybe we will do a small amount of nine and 13 – but first I think we’ll see if 11 truly makes sense.”

For me, a flattering pair of trousers will always have a place in a capsule wardrobe, whether it’s an odd or even number on the label, and I reckon Dai’s size 11’s nailed that brief.

‘We thought let’s just run a size 11 and see if it truly is that magic size’