[orbisvicis]

> By destandardising sizes

Oh. I thought there was an outside chance you intended a positive response. Ah well.

> Age, health and status

I can understand age. But wouldn't everyone want to signal good health and high status?

[roenxi]

> I can understand age. But wouldn't everyone want to signal good health and high status?

Yeah, but generally not with fashion. Male fashion tends not to go to the same sort of lengths to showcase legs/torsos/arms/chest that women's fashion does. For men if they want to signal status they tend to buy a car they can't afford or something.

And male health is one of those areas where it is very complicated. A fat, balding man who smells funny can make up for that with a high income. A fat balding woman who smells funny might be able to do the same thing but I can't help feel sceptical at the idea.

Anyway, long story short, the people who aren't using fashion as signalling can just buy a shirt that fits and move on. It's a shirt. They aren't complicated.

[sfn42]

There's also the fact that most men aren't very healthy - you'll often see very fit men wearing "revealing" and tight-fitting clothes that show off their muscles etc, whereas everyone else wears less revealing clothes because whatever they may reveal isn't very flattering.

The same is true for most women of course but a lot of them seem to wear revealing clothing regardless of how flattering it actually is.

[wooger]

People with bad health, low status being able to wear the same clothes as young women with good health and status removes the signalling benefit of those clothes.

[Maxion]

> But wouldn't everyone want to signal good health and high status?

The thing with people is that they are all different. There are a lot of people who don't want to be of high status or signal it. There's lots of people who don't really care for health and value other things higher.

[karambahh]

Definition of "high status" vary by demographics.

Some want to carry X sportswear with prominent branding, others take pride in high-price tag items without any explicit branding.

The "I identify with this athlete", "I identify with this musician", "I dgaf what you think of me" groups probably don't intersect much, with brands and offering catering to these and multiple others...?