1. I truly appreciate the reviews on MO. I truly appreciate the reviews on MO. I truly appreciate the reviews on MO. So please take the foregoing in a constructive vein.
2. This one was not up to your usual standards; although if you had labelled it as "a jacket for newbies" or something like that it would have represented the story more accurately.
3. The problem with Alpinestars (and many other brands I won't mention) is that the products seem to shrink in size when assembled in the Orient. My Alpinestar SP-1 gloves barely fit around my hand. While this sometimes happens due to an aggressive wrist fit (a safety factor to keep the glove from coming off accidentally in a spill), several other dimensions were also smaller than other products. (For example, the middle finger-to-thumb span hinders movement when the span between those two exceeds about 70 degrees.)
This is not a slam specifically at Alpinestars. My experience is that almost every generic XXL size jacket is too small for me. But, since many vendors of motorcycle clothing just provide a design which is exclusively manufactured in China (or Korea, or the Philippines, or...), they appear to give up control over sizing without too much thought. And since it reduces the offshore manufacturer's costs to use a little less fabric, sizes for some brands are consistently smaller than others.
4. So, may I present a suggestion? Comments on any garment's fit are always subjective, just like comments on riding position and wind buffeting. To address this, Motorcycle Consumer News has a practice of describing the testers who rode the motorcycles. (For the larger tests, anyway.) Part of this includes the testers height and weight. At a minimum, I would suggest that you give the dimensions of the tester and of the jacket. In this way, readers have a better chance of determining if the vendor's sizing is close enough to theirs to justify taking a chance on an online order.
Some dimensions I'd suggest from the tester:
Jacket size
Waist size
Arm length
Chest size (although perhaps an intrusive question for women testers;
I am not asking for Danielle's measurements!)
Shoulder width
Neck size
And from the jacket itself, measured with the jacket laying flat:
Arm length
Shoulder length (seam to seam)
Inside length (base of jacket to armpit)
Waist size (or bottom size for 3/4 and longer length jackets)
Zipper length
It's not as much work as it sounds...and perhaps you might get a tailor to take the measurements. Or ask Bates, they are in the neighborhood...
At any rate, to repeat: I truly appreciate the reviews on MO. I would present these suggestions in the hope of getting a little better sizing information.
Thank you,
Hank Murphy (don't know where my logon went)
