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| Saturday, 13 December 2003 |
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Fashion industry helps medical research by Claire Rosemberg PARIS, France's fashion industry has struck a rare deal with medical research to update the country's sizing system, a move aimed at advancing scientific knowledge on obesity and diabetes while enabling garment manufacturers at last to make clothes that fit. At a media conference doctors and researchers working in public health in the northern, economically-deprived Paris suburbs said they were joining a two-year project kicked off by the French Textile and Clothing Industry (IFTH) to measure 10,000 people by end 2004. The project, the National Sizing Campaign, will be the first attempt to measure the French since 1973, this time using state-of-the-art 3D technology. "Human morphology has changed over the years, and obesity and excess weight are spreading," said Jean-Louis Pauc, who heads public health services in the Seine-Saint-Denis department, which currently has France's highest proportion of obesity sufferers - a whopping 17.2 percent. The campaign to update the sizing system and produce clothes that fit and feel right began early this year with the help of a chain of stores that set up special booths in the shops, equipped with 3D body scans to measure people aged between five and 70. "We needed to update clothes sizes left unchanged for 30 years," said Dominique Chamussy, who heads the IFTH. "We needed to shed new light on the French men and women of today." So far, results from 3,000 people sized up show the French three to four centimetres taller than they were three decades ago, with 20 percent of people sporting excess weight and 10 percent suffering from obesity. The booths used in the sizing campaign project a 3-D image of the person measured, standing up and sitting down, a 15-minute exercise in all. Volunteers fill in a questionnaire and right-to-privacy paper and strip before undergoing a few hand-measurements - height, weight, hands and head. A 10-second scan is then carried out by a laser beam which transmits 85 measurements onto a screen. But nine months on, the 1.5-million-euro project is running behind schedule and the results are skewered, with too many women and too few men volunteering, and not enough jobless people, workers or elderly people. To ensure a representative sample for the survey, the IFTH has taken its 150,000-euro booths to schools, town halls, offices and factories, and this week to the big Bobigny local health care centre where 75 percent of the people who come to consult are jobless. The doctor who heads the centre, Herve Le Clesiau, said the results of the sizing campaign would be used to help research links between morphology and metabolic problems such as high blood pressure, diabetes and obesity, and would serve in preventive medecine. Another project headed by rhumatologist Richard Treves will scan the soles of patients being measured and study the links between feet and chronic pain in the knees, hips and lower back. The National Sizing Campaign was launched amid mounting public complaint about poor sizing and industry awareness that clothes no longer fit right. "For now we only have intuitions about the development of human morphology. This study will provide scientific data," said Regis Mollard, who heads the Laboratory of Applied Anthropology at the Rene Descartes University in Paris. Studies in Britain show women growing bigger, bustier and more tubular - losing their waistlines - through the years, a development also noted by fashion designers and makers of tailors' dummies. But no scientific data exists and its availability has only become possible with the development of hi-tech body-scanning devices. Mollard said legs had grown more than torsos "and we do know there are less and less small people." |
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