The dotsuit part 2: The verdict

One of my more memorable outfits of 2018 was the now infamous dotsuit, or to use it’s real name, the ZOZOsuit. To read the original article, click here, but the short version of it is that using a body fitting suit with coded dots applied to it, an app on your smartphone can make quite accurate measurements of your body, and using the same app you can then order from a selection of clothes that are custom made to your measurements.

So far so good, I recorded my measurements, twice, as there was an element of practice involved and ordered a pair of jeans and a white button-down shirt from the selection offered. When I tried this out there wasn’t a huge range of clothes available and what was available would best be classed as staples or basics. Anyhow, a pair of jeans and a white shirt is always usable, or so my thinking went. Price-wise they’re above the really cheap High Street shops, but less than the mid-range brands. So justifiable if they’re decent quality and a good fit.

Well, after about 6 weeks they did arrive. This was 2 weeks after the estimated delivery time, but they did come all the way from Shenzhen, China via Germany, so maybe they just didn’t travel well.

When they arrived I did post an unboxing on my Instagram-TV channel, this can be watched here:

I’ll admit quite freely that after the initial trial, I did try them once more, and then put them aside. A while later I wore the shirt for a day.

I should point out that while it’s possible to adjust the measurements to be used, in the interest of science I went with exactly what was suggested. It wouldn’t be much of a test if I’d modified the fit, right?  So I went with the suggestions of the software.

The result:

You don’t need to be an expert at reading between the lines to work out that I wasn’t really all that impressed. Here are some photos I took today:

The fit of the custom made shirt from ZOZO.

Shirts I like to have the right shoulder width, a regular fit body and a collar where I can do up the top button up if wearing a tie. The collar button is normally my bane when buying standard fit shirts, as I have a thick neck. The ZOZO shirt isn’t entirely off. The length of the arms is good and the body is short enough to wear untucked. the neck is a touch tight, but merely a little uncomfortable, not tight enough to make me woozy. The body and width of the arms though? I can’t see how this is tailored to my size at all. While I don’t enjoy slim fit shirts much, as I imagine is the case for most middle-aged men, a billowing shirt is not very flattering either. The shirt fabric is an unremarkable white cotton fabric.

The fit of the ZOZO made to measure jeans.

Over to the jeans then. I like my jeans to be narrow of leg and high of waist. I selected the model most appropriate from the selection. I will say that the denim used actually looks quite nice. It’s the bluest variant on offer and has a little stretch for comfort. Normally I find the most cardboard-like denim available, but this was as close as I could get. The trousers feel a little bit strange on, as if the cut is off, but it’s even stranger once looking at them. The legs are cut very short, and I’m not even sure the same length. The waist is very generously cut, which again is strange as it’s supposedly made to measure. If I was to wear thee without a belt they’d work their way down in short order.

Construction-wise the shirt is the better of the two, with felled seams up the sides. The jeans are more hastily assembled, with overlocked seams up both sides of the legs in the manner of low-end fast fashion jeans.

Summary:

The result? Well, it’s clear that the software can’t read my mind with regards to my exact preferences for fit, so I can really only judge on how the garments fit my body. The trousers have an oversize waist, very fitted legs and seem pretty short. The shirt has a reasonable shoulder width, but the arms are very wide and the body of the shirt is huge.

While the garments themselves were reasonably well made, I was very surprised by how poorly they fit. I’ve no doubt they are made according to the measurements taken by using the dot-suit, but something must have gone awry during the design and cutting process, as there is no way you could say that these clothes actually look made to measure. Were the dot-suit measurements wide of the mark, or does the garment factory software need a lot of tweaking? Hard to say, but as it stands I’ll give this a miss until it looks like the results may be better.

I do think the idea of reasonably priced made to measure clothes has merit though, especially shirts for bodies that don’t fit industry standard measurements. For it to be a success though they have to actually fit, be competitively priced, be well designed and use a good fabric.

I do see an alternative use for the dot-suit though, and that’s if you’re in a process of tweaking your body, either through dieting or bodybuilding. Being able to pull on the dotted top and bottom gives you a really quick and easy way to measure the results and log progress. I think this use possibly has more merit than ordering clothes from Zozo as things stand right now.

Please note:

This post was entirely unsponsored and unsolicited. ZOZO, the company I used, do offer a full refund if not happy. This put me in a quandary, as Norwegians customs charged me about 50% duty and VAT on the package when it arrived. Hence if I returned the garments, even with a full refund of the garment value, I’d still not actually get much of a refund. And I’d have to cover my own return postage, further reducing it. At the end of the day, it just seemed less of a hassle to keep them. Sunk cost and all that.

Being measured by the ZOZO app wearing the dotsuit.