You make an interesting point about the use of centimetres in the Netherlands. However you did not note how long it took for the Netherlands garment making industry to change from such things as 'duims' to centimetres. As the Netherlands were the first nation in the world to effectively adopt the metric system* they have had enough time (194 years – 1816 to now) to accommodate the difficulty of changing to the metric system using centimetres.
And you keep putting it down to choosing cm over mm, rather than the fact that metrication for the clothing industry doesn't produce the same jump in ease-of-use as say the construction industry, in which awkward fractional overlarge inches are replaced by whole number millimeters to a precision that is required.
For the clothing industry, a precision down to mm is not required -- indeed it is gross overkill. Imperial sizes work down to the half-inch, which means the centimeter is just the right size. It is just changing from half-inches to whole centimeters, while still a win, doesn't offer the same quantum leap as going from five-and-three-eighth-inches to 137 mm, so overcoming the natural inertia against change is going to be harder.
My claim is that cm is the 'right' choice of units for clothing sizes (as well as people's height, snowfall and a very few other areas). If this is not correct, why do not see mm used in established metric countries for those applications ?
Your claim is that choosing mm rather than cm would make the transition faster. Fair enough, but where's the evidence ? Can you cite one country that achieved a fast metrication transition *in that industry* by choosing mm ? Just because it works for construction and engineering (and I agree 100% on the choice of mm here) does not mean you can extrapolate it to an industry with a different set of requirements. I would claim that any attempt at metricating clothing sizes or people's height would change a slow migration to one that was doomed to failure.
Please, let's remember that the inch is enemy - not the cm or liter, and let's not keep misquoting the "rule of 1000" which refers to choosing prefixes that yield a result in the range 1 to 1000 rather than avoiding prefixes like centi.
Tom Wade
