Never be annoyed by badly-fitting clothing again! (Or at least, you’ll be forewarned, with this new garment-hanging clothing annotation system.) The ultimate in coat hanging technology.

Background:

Clothing comes in a wide variety of sizes, and it’s likely that a person will accumulate garments that fit to various degrees of acceptability.

The Issue:

Annoyingly, it can be hard to remember which clothing items have which styles of fit. One could imagine the solution of just throwing out everything that wasn’t a perfect fit, but this doesn’t work well, because:

  • A person might have a bunch of garments that used to fit, but don’t quite fit anymore (and maybe they hope they’ll fit again in the near future)
  • A person might own some “comfortable” pants that are super baggy, and some “professional” ones that are a better fit.
  • A person might have an uncomfortable dress shirt that they only wear every three years for some sort of event.

In these cases, it makes sense for a person to keep questionably-fitting garments around. Which of the 5 pairs of identical looking jeans is the “comfortable” pair? Which shirt is the uncomfortable but properly-fitted one for attending a wedding? You’ve gotta try them on to find out (Figure 1).

Fig. 1: For most types of clothing, it isn’t immediately obvious what the fit will be. So a person might have a set of baggy jeans and a set of tight jeans that visually look similar.

Proposal:

The solution is to annotate the clothing with its degree of fit: then you’d be able to tell, at a glance, which clothes were which.

The simplest way to do this would be to add two dials to a garment hanger (Fig. 2) that you (the wearer), would manually set to indicate the quality of fit of the article of clothing in question.

Fig. 2: A user manually adjusts the two dials on this coat hanger to indicate the fit of the article of clothing (say, a pair of jeans) being hung on it. These hanger indicates (if the dials are to be believed) that the jeans are slightly too long and too skinny for the wearer.

In this specific proposal, the indicators are two dials, but really anything would work: the “easy” version of this idea would be to just get a couple of different types of coat hangers: one color for “casual” clothes and one for “dress” clothes.

Conclusion:

Implementing a prototype of this (a sticky note on the hanger that says “uncomfortable dress shirt”) has been an effective method of answering the question “what the heck is this shirt that I never wear (and why have I not gotten rid of it).“ Now I know!

PROS: Probably could actually be sold as a real product in the genre of “things people give as gifts.” Very inexpensive to manufacture, too!

CONS: After washing multiple similar-looking articles of clothing, it might be difficult to match them to the correct hanger.