Four numbers decide whether a swimwear sample will fit you, and most models get at least one of them wrong.
Not wrong by much. Two centimetres, usually. Which sounds like nothing until you are standing in a fitting with a bikini bottom that will not sit flat, twenty minutes into a day the client is paying for by the hour.
Our casting form asks for height, bust, waist and hips, in centimetres, and we read a few hundred cards a season. This is how to get those four numbers right, and why they carry more weight than the photographs.
Why model measurements matter more than the pictures
A swimwear range is cut to one sample size. One set of numbers, one sample of each style, and until bulk production runs that sample is the only one in the world. Casting is the job of finding a person who fits it well enough to be photographed without a row of pins down the back.
Stretch fabric forgives a little. From what we see in fittings, a swim sample has about four centimetres of give on the hips and a good deal less on the bust, because a cup that is wrong is wrong from every angle.
So a card that says 90 on the hips when the tape says 94 is not a small thing. It is the gap between a sample that photographs and one that does not, and nobody finds out until the morning of the shoot.
Honest numbers get you booked for the right job. Optimistic numbers get you booked for the wrong one.
What you need
A soft tape measure, the fabric kind a tailor uses. Fifty rupees at a stationery counter. Not a steel tape from a toolbox, which cannot follow a curve and reads short.
Thin, close-fitting underwear, or nothing. Never over clothes, not even a vest. Cotton adds a centimetre before you have started.
A mirror, and ideally a second person. You can do this alone, but the tape drifts as you twist to read it, and it never drifts in your favour.
A pen. Write each number down as you take it rather than holding four in your head.
How to measure yourself for a casting
Stand straight, feet together, weight even, breathing normally. Relaxed, not held. The tape sits flat on the skin and level all the way round, snug enough not to slip and loose enough not to dent you.
Height
Shoes off, back to a wall, heels touching it. Rest a flat book on your head, level, and mark where its underside meets the wall. Measure from the floor to the mark.
Do not go from memory. The number you have carried around since school was taken in shoes, or by someone in a hurry.
Bust
Tape around the fullest part of the chest, level across the back. Position it with your arms up, then bring them down before you read it. Breathe out normally.
Take a second measurement directly under the bust, where a bra band sits. Our form does not ask for it, but a swim client will, because band and cup are two different fits and one bust number cannot tell them apart.
Waist
Your natural waist is the narrowest point of your torso, usually a couple of centimetres above the navel. Bend to one side and the crease that forms is where the tape goes.
Do not pull in. Everyone does it, nobody admits it, and it takes two or three centimetres off the number. Then you get matched to a sample cut for a person who does not exist.
Hips
The one people get wrong most often, because they measure the wrong place.
Hips, to anyone cutting a garment, means the fullest part of your seat, not the hip bones. Feet together, tape around the widest point of your bottom and upper thighs, and check in the mirror that it is level at the back. It sits lower than most people expect, roughly twenty centimetres below the waist.
For swimwear this is the number that decides the most. A bikini bottom is graded on it. Get this one right before any of the others.
The extras that help
Inside leg, crotch to floor, if you want to be considered for activewear. Shoe size in the system you actually buy shoes in, and say which. Dress size, Indian or UK, and say which. Bra size, with the band and the cup.
None of it is required on our card. All of it gets used.
The mistakes we see every week
Roughly in order of how often they arrive.
- Rounding down. 91 becomes 90, and 90 becomes 88 on a hopeful day. Write what the tape says.
- Measuring over clothes. Leggings alone add a centimetre on the hips.
- Hips taken at the bone instead of the fullest point. Reads five to eight centimetres small.
- A tape that slopes down at the back. A sloping tape reads long.
- Inches on a card that asks for centimetres. A 36 next to a 92 has cost more than one applicant a booking, because nobody stops to work out which is which.
- Numbers from two years ago. Bodies change and comp cards do not update themselves.
- Measuring late in the evening or after a big meal. Waist and hips read a centimetre or two larger at night. Morning, before breakfast, is the fair reading.
For a while we accepted measurements in inches as well, on the theory that it would make the form easier for people who grew up with inches. It made the form worse. Cards arrived with one number in each system and we spent time converting them that should have gone on the pictures. The form now says centimetres, and it is not going back.
What we do with the numbers
The card comes in. Before anyone looks hard at the pictures, the four numbers go against the sample grades for the range being cast.
If they fit a grade, the card goes into the pile that gets a proper look. If they do not, it goes on file for the next range, which is cut to a different set of numbers more often than you would think. A no in one season becomes a yes in another, but only if the numbers on file are real.
Nobody is judging them. There is no good hip measurement and no bad one. There is a sample, and a person who fits it or does not. That is the whole of it.
Measure twice, then date it
Take the four numbers on two mornings a few days apart. If any of them differ by more than a centimetre, take them a third time and send the average, not the one you like.
Write the date beside them. Set a reminder for six months, sooner if your training or your weight changes, and send us the new numbers when they do.
Ten minutes, no cost, and the most useful thing on your card.