The clothing industry should come up with a pair of data formats to describe the measurements of people and of clothing. Once a consumer chose to be measured and recorded in significant detail, the measurements could be provided in the standard format. This would enable several neat applications:

• Web sites selling clothing could interpret the measurements and model the clothes selected on a virtual dummy based exactly on the consumer. This could help customers understand whether a piece of clothing looks good for their specific body.
• Seamstresses and other makers of custom clothing could have real, physical models of their customers produced by a process similar to 3-D printing, to fit clothing more exactly, either before final fitting with the customer, or when the customer is far away.
• Automated machines could produce semi-custom clothing, using the measurements of the customer and adapting the clothing dimensions per instructions in the XML indicating which panels could be expanded or shrunk, and by how much.

I would have assumed that the infrastructure to implement this already existed — Levi Strauss bought a company that did some of this fifteen years ago — but the Levi Strauss operation didn’t seem to rely on any industry standards, which would drive costs down.

I couldn’t tease out the correct Google keywords if this does exist, nor did I find a relevant schema on Wikipedia’s list of XML schemas. (Because isn’t every format an XML schema these days?)