China is now universally regarded as the workshop of the world and manufacturers from all over the world and beyond are rapidly finding out that the "Made in China" label has made a delightful 180-degree turn. Now, "Made in China" denotes consistent quality, prompt delivery times and reliability.

Design, product development and testing in the home country but doing volume manufacturing in China makes increasing sense as national labour union rules and collective labour "agreements" have, in many cases, priced local labour off the market.

Many of those collective agreements were not agreements at all: most were forced down the throats of defenceless factory proprietors who had a choice of paying unsustainable rates of pay or shutting down. Those local socialist chickens are now coming home to roost in socialist China.

Currently, many famous clothing and footwear labels are churned out literally by the millions in Chinese factories with foreign quality inspectors ensuring that only the creme-de-la-creme in garments and footwear reach the international market.

The international market is, of course, very international and international body sizes vary greatly. Big-Mac and Whopper Country tends to grow Whopper people and garments that can almost fit two slender Chinese with space to spare might be labelled "small" for the US market. And Chinese XL would be suitable only for Uncle Sam's 12-year-old son.

Reject garments, faults on which can sometimes be detected with the aid of a microscope only, are available in Chinese markets at super cheap prices. The makeshift fitting rooms in those market stalls usually consist of a sheet that is held up by the assistant while the customer strips himself half naked to try the garment for size.

Yours, somewhat prudish, truly, who really knows a bargain when he sees one, had the unfortunate experience that when he was stripped half naked in the "fitting-room", the assistant dropped the sheet, exposing a lot of XX-rated white skin to passers-by in the street, who loudly clapped and cheered.

In order to avoid an "encore" of this highly embarrassing catastrophe, I have had to rely on the labels. Occasionally with disastrous results as, often, there is no indication for which market the garment was manufactured and, ipso facto, how the size designation is to be translated to a common denominator.

I fear with great fear that I am not the only one who has suffered and, worse, wasted money.

It is therefore surprising in the extreme that a sensible, logical and easy to understand comprehensive garment sizing system has not been implemented worldwide. A combination of numbers and letters would take buying garments out of the guessing game and into realm of a precise science.

Let's look at a shirt or sweater: 36/96/64R would mean 36cm neck circumference, 96cm chest circumference (measured over the nipples!), sweater length 64cm from collar to crotch, L for large fit, the sloppy fit for today's' "with-it" teenager, T for tight fit and R for regular fit. The same for trousers and jackets and underwear and singlets.

Unfortunately, I am not terrible "au fait" with ladies' brassieres but there must be a better way than "A" and "B" and "DD" cups. Not having a model available to test upon right now, I would venture to suggest that it is not very difficult to measure the half circumference across the mound, say, 27/88F, the 88cm being the flat chest size. "F" for full cup, H for half cup and "JJ" for Janet Jackson style (as seen on TV).

For shoes from big toe to heel as the Chinese are doing already followed by width at the base of the small toe thus: 27/10 then we can do away with meaningless A, B and C widths.

I am sure that brainier types than I can fine-tune the system. I concede, however, that it is high time that illogical code numbers and confusing and subjective size indication systems go in the dustbin.

A warm welcome to a verifiable and logic clothing size indication system.

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