This is probably one of the most frequent questions I get asked. And honestly, it’s no wonder, because brands make it super confusing. The two words ‘short’ and ‘petite’ get thrown around as though they mean exactly the same thing, but they don’t.

Short and petite offerings are two very different things, and it’s important you know the difference. It might be the exact reason you still feel you can’t find clothes that fit your body properly. Remember, it’s never your body, it’s the clothes!

So in this post I’m going to break it all down. What short and petite really mean, why brands so often choose short lengths instead of proper petite fits, and exactly what you should be looking for in a genuine petite piece. By the end you’ll know exactly what to check when you’re trying things on, so you can stop buying clothes that don’t fit properly.

What “short” actually means?

Then a brand offers a “short” length, all they have done is taken their regular garment and shortened the hem. That’s it. Just chopped off a couple of inches, usually between 2 and 3″, and called it short.

You’ll see it mostly on jeans and trousers, but plenty of brands do it on skirts, dresses and jumpsuits too. It’s an easy way to tick the inclusive sizing box, but it means that NOTHING else gets adjusted.

Taking two or three inches off a hem doesn’t make something petite, it just makes it shorter. And as we know, we don’t just have shorter legs, we have shorter proportions, so chopping a few inches off the bottom isn’t going to fix everything else. The shoulder seam stays where it was. The armhole stays the same depth. The bust darts still point at the same spot. The waist seam hasn’t been touched. The rise is unchanged and the sleeves are still the length they always were, just to name a few.

A short length can genuinely be useful though, and I don’t want to write it off completely. If you know what you’re looking for and how to check whether an item actually fits you correctly, this can still be an option.

So why do so many brands go down the short route?

Simply put, it’s because it’s cheap and it’s easy to do, and I say that as someone with a fashion degree and twenty five years in the industry. I know how a pattern gets created, so I know exactly what’s involved in doing this properly.

To make a genuinely petite garment, a brand has to create a whole new pattern block. Every piece re-drafted, re-graded across the size range, sampled, fitted on an actual petite model, then corrected. It’s a real investment of time and money.

A short length costs them almost nothing by comparison. They take the pattern they’ve already got, shorten it at the hem, and the job’s done. Same garment, slightly shorter.