Interesting article and a large amount of research into something that is often way more opaque than it should be.<p>However I’d also like to point out that with large companies like Levi’s there are often fit discrepancies as large as an inch between ‘identical’ items of the same style, size, color, etc. This is why I would advise most people to buy clothes in a retail shop if at all possible.<p>This comes down to two things.<p>1. Making clothes at such large scale and at a low cost means there are many corners cut in terms of precision, in both cutting and sewing. See this short video [1] to get an idea of how this process works.<p>2. Levi’s and other large companies don’t own their production. Instead they contract (and then subcontract) to large numbers of both ‘conventional’ factories and piece-work workshops often as small as just some machines in someone’s living room. These companies make such large orders that no single factory could ever cover them, so batches of ‘identical’ products are sourced from a large number of producers, even multiple countries at times. Of course there are SLAs about the spec that must be met for each garment but the reality is that it diverges enormously.<p>[1] <a href="https://youtu.be/BNN3oY9oGPU" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/BNN3oY9oGPU</a>