{"id":46409,"date":"2016-04-01T18:33:17","date_gmt":"2016-04-01T18:33:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/?p=46409"},"modified":"2016-04-01T18:33:17","modified_gmt":"2016-04-01T18:33:17","slug":"can-a-dress-shirt-be-racist","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=46409","title":{"rendered":"Can a Dress Shirt Be Racist?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Can a Dress Shirt Be Racist?<\/a><\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

Backchannel<\/a>
\n2016-03-31<\/p>\n

Moises Velasquez-Manoff<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
\nIllustration by Michael Marsicano<\/a><\/small><\/p>\n

A startup finds that asking for certain data improves the fit of its clothes\u200a\u2014\u200aand lands the company in a cultural minefield<\/em><\/p>\n

In 2008, an entrepreneur named Seph Skerritt was frustrated with the way he shopped for clothes. Then a student at MIT\u2019s Sloan School of Management, he chafed at the time wasted while trying on garments in stores. Often, he thought, you settled on an ill-fitting item just to get the drudgery over with.<\/p>\n

While on an internship in Asia, Skerritt had encountered the effortless magic of having a tailor custom-fit your shirt. Why not improve on that concept, he wondered, with an online service that fitted your shirts by asking you questions, and then mailed you the garments?<\/p>\n

He christened his company Proper Cloth<\/a>. Naysayers told him that when customers input their measurements, they often made mistakes\u200a\u2014\u200athe idea wouldn\u2019t scale. But Skerritt thought that guessing, even if one\u2019s guesses were occasionally off, was still preferable to the chaos and disappointment experienced in a physical store.<\/p>\n

So he set about developing an algorithm that could customize your shirt without needing a tape measure. As a check against errors in customers\u2019 reported measurements, he thought up a list of basic questions\u200a\u2014\u200aheight, weight, and so on\u200a\u2014\u200athat could serve as indicators of shirt size. Then, using these questions, he made shirts for 30 guys who worked at the New York City<\/a> tech incubator hosting his startup, called Dogpatch Labs.<\/p>\n

When the volunteers tried on their shirts, Skerritt quickly saw what worked and what didn\u2019t. Asking about waist size was insufficient, for example, because it gave no indication of the size of one\u2019s midsection. So Skerritt added a question about how far one\u2019s belly protruded. Other questions were too confusing, like one about how T-shirts fit around your chest and shoulders. Those queries were omitted.<\/p>\n

He noticed an odd pattern. In that first batch of 30, the shirts fit best on testers who were Caucasians. They seemed to fit worse, in a predictable way, on people who weren\u2019t Caucasian. All subjects of one ancestry\u200a\u2014\u200aAsian, say\u200a\u2014\u200aseemed to require the same general alterations. Skerritt noted the anomaly and added a question on what he called \u201cethnicity\u201d: Asian, Black, Caucasian, Hispanic, or \u201cI\u2019m not sure.\u201d The question, Skerritt says, has proven invaluable to sizing his customers\u2019 shirts.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s no denying the satisfaction of a smartly tailored shirt. But with this one question, the once mundane world of dress shirts is now dabbling in a kind of racial profiling. Are we ready to dredge up centuries of racial strife, simply for a perfect fit?…<\/p>\n

Read the entire article here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Can a Dress Shirt Be Racist? Backchannel 2016-03-31 Moises Velasquez-Manoff Illustration by Michael Marsicano A startup finds that asking for certain data improves the fit of its clothes\u200a\u2014\u200aand lands the company in a cultural minefield In 2008, an entrepreneur named Seph Skerritt was frustrated with the way he shopped for clothes. Then a student at […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1649,12,8],"tags":[23388,23389,15332,23387],"class_list":["post-46409","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-anthropology","category-articles","category-media-archive","tag-backchannel","tag-fashion","tag-moises-velasquez-manoff","tag-seph-skerritt"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46409","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=46409"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46409\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":46410,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46409\/revisions\/46410"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=46409"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=46409"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=46409"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}