I was in a ski shop on 57th street two Decembers ago holding two pairs of gloves. Both had a “Large” printed on their tags, but one actually fit like a glove while the other was like putting your hands into kitchen mitt. My coworker, the guy who sits behind the desk in accounting who notices all kinds of things but says nothing on principle, was there too for reasons lost to history and even he couldn’t contain himself to mutter “those look like oven mitts, man.” That right there is the single problem with glove sizes summed up perfectly in one guy’s words. The letter of the tag is less measurement and more suggestion and every brand has a slightly different suggestion based around hand shapes that might resemble yours or might totally not.
So when I got a text from a friend last week asking how to figure out glove sizes, my wholeheartedly truthful reply was that the part where you use a tape measure is the easy five percent of it. Everything that happens after you have that number is where you really start to figure out whether you’ll have something you actually wear or something you hang onto out of stubbornness and use to make yourself feel guilty every winter, and how much you’re willing to listen when the actual material you’re buying argues with that math.
Get your measurement right, but don’t treat it like gospel
I’m not even going to pretend like I don’t know the standard method, it isn’t rocket surgery and I’m not about to make it sound like it needs three paragraphs of buildup. You take a tape measure and wrap it around the widest part of your dominant hand from knuckle to knuckle, excluding the thumb, and record the inches.
That number, which is sometimes rounded up or down to the nearest whole inch depending on who’s talking, is approximately your glove size. Most charts will take that measurement and convert it into whatever designation that brand uses for men’s gloves, like a Large. I’ve measured myself six times over the years because lie never trust myself to remember the last time I looked and I get a different number each time depending on how tight I pull the tape against my hand. Think about how closely those numbers actually need to be.
The thing that took me way too long to wrap my brain around is that circumference only tells you about width. My hands are about average width but my fingers are long and for years I bought gloves that perfectly fit my palm but left half an inch of spare room at the tip of each finger like I was wearing gloves stolen from Fred Savage. The solution, once I bothered to do the research instead of quitting after the circumference, is to measure the length of your hand too. From the base of your palm to the tip of your middle finger so you have both dimensions for what should properly be two dimensional. If they only ask for circumference I’ve learned to assume that their sizing chart is meant for an average hand that might sort of fit yours.
And here’s something else nobody ever mentions but I discovered through my years of torment: your dominant and non dominant hands are almost never exactly the same size, and mine are off by nearly a quarter inch. That’s not enough to really matter unless you’re wearing a glove that fits so differently on each side that it drives you nuts. Trust me, it does. I measure both hands now out of what is entirely too much caution for something that will cost you sixty dollars but I’d rather take the extra minute than wind up with a glove that fits like someone made it in a fantasy world where hands are symmetrical.
If you find yourself between sizes on the chart, and it feels like everyone does because hands almost never measure to clean whole numbers, I always round up instead of down. We’ll get to why in a minute when we talk about materials.
Your material is going to argue with your measurement
This is where the tape measure goes out the window and real life experience comes in because wool gloves and leather gloves are going to disagree with those measurements wholesale even when they supposedly are the same size. Leather stretches, sometimes quite a bit depending on the cut and how it’s sewn, after you’ve worn them for a few days as it adjusts to your hand and how you hold things. Thing I learned only after buying two pairs of leather gloves at different sizes because the “right size” didn’t feel as damn comfortable as the pair I stretched out by wearing them. A leather glove that feels just a little tight when you try it on is usually going to be the right choice because it will give. Fabric gloves do the opposite.
They’ll hold their shape no matter what, and some fibers like wool and fleece will even shrink when you wash them, so if you size fabric gloves how you would leather gloves you’ll end up with something that fits great in October and suddenly hates you by January.
Lining is another thing that massively effects fit and hardly anyone takes into consideration at all. A glove designed to actually keep your hands warm, something with a fleece or thermal lining, is going to swallow up significantly more room inside than that same size glove in something sheer meant for golfing in July. The number on the size chart is your starting point now, not an iron clad guarantee. I have two pairs of gloves in the exact same size, one lined and one not, and can fit at least half a finger more into the unlined pair just because there isn’t crap stitched into the palm.
If you’re shopping online and unable to try things before you buy, which is almost all of us ninety percent of the time at this point, that last point is what makes sizing up half a size worth it whenever there’s more than maybe thumb room worth of lining in the glove. You can’t fit your hand and a bulky lining into the same amount of space you’d need if that lining wasn’t there.
The tl;dr version of all this is that the tape measure is just going to get you in the ballpark and the materials will tell you if you need to knock on that ballpark’s door or try the house next door. I’d rather have gloves that are a hair too big at the fingertips than fingers too numb from restricted blood flow to truly feel how badly I sized down. Get the measurements on both hands, take length into account as well as width, and then defer to the material the glove is actually made out of when you’re picking your size. That’s the method and advice I can stand behind after buying more pairs than any man needs.
Ade works in finance in the City and treats his wardrobe like a portfolio, which he admits is a slightly mad way to think about a blazer. He writes about office clothes that survive twelve hour days, back to back meetings and the odd video call.
