Center Out
What does this mean?
Saw a great example of CENTER OUT adjustments for jeans this week!
The fit issue is the need for more torso circumference:
The pants fit perfectly everywhere except at the center front.
Traditional pant fitting methods assess the figure and its variations. The ‘problem’ is the abdomen the recommendation is to ‘add the extra fabric where it is needed’, i.e. at the center. Cue the full tummy adjustment:
Intuitively this adjustment makes sense
and there’s nothing wrong or incorrect about this approach.
But it is not the only adjustment possible!
In body neutral pants fitting, we fit center out.
The center refers to the center line on the body.
The extra fabric needed to allow the crotch seam to map onto the body center comes from the side.
The maker gets to decide if the fabric is added equally to front and back and where it blends into the original side seam.
Here are just a few of the possible options:
And here is @meriam.thesewist putting this into action on the ill-fitting RTW jeans:
With great results!
The Center Out Concept
In this example, adjusting center out has some obvious benefits; not having to mess with the fly front and flat fell crotch seam.
Are there additional benefits to fitting center out?
The concept for fitting pants center out is more than positioning the crotch seam at the center of the body.
It is key for guiding fit decisions, hence the term TopDownCenterOut (with apologies to British English spellers).
