Nobody ever said the size was wrong

A garment tag, printed small and high on the left chest — the kind that's usually stitched inside a collar, moved out where it can be read. One line on it: SIZE M.

Two hands are holding the shoulders out, checking the fit in a mirror. The fit isn't the point. The tag being visible is.

What is this a picture of?

A shirt that never fit, worn anyway, with the fact printed rather than fixed.

Somebody guessed a size — a shoulder width, a build, a habit of buying loose — and got it wrong. The gift got kept, worn a few times to be polite, then folded to the back of a drawer for a year or two. This is that shirt's tag, the actual fact of the mismatch, moved from a hidden seam to the front where it can't be missed.

Why print the tag instead of just saying it didn't fit?

Because the tag says it without anyone having to.

A conversation about a wrong size runs into the same problem every time: there's no way to raise it that doesn't sound like a complaint about a present. The tag sidesteps that by being a fact rather than a comment — a label, stated flatly, the same register a real one already uses. Nobody reads a size tag as an accusation.

Why does saying it out loud feel like the wrong move?

Because a gift comes with an unstated instruction to receive it well, and mentioning the size breaks that instruction even when nobody meant it to.

Guessing right is hard. Two things you already know about someone are usually enough to get it right — but a guess is still a guess, and correcting it after the fact makes the giver relive the moment they got it wrong. Most people would rather keep a shirt that doesn't fit than hand someone that feeling back.

Is there ever a genuine edge case, not a wrong guess?

Yes — sizes overlap by design, and a guess can be reasonable and still land wrong.

The recommended bands for adjacent sizes overlap on purpose, because a chest measurement alone doesn't settle whether someone wants it close or loose. A shirt bought a size off isn't always a mistake. It can just be a guess that landed on the wrong side of a line that was never sharp to begin with.

Does the shirt have to stay unworn?

No — the print is often what makes it wearable again.

A shirt that's genuinely too big can be worn deliberately loose rather than accidentally so — there's a whole register of styling built around an oversized fit that turns the same measurement into a choice instead of an error. The tag print does the same thing from a different angle: once the size is the joke rather than the secret, wearing it stops being an act of politeness and starts being a decision.

Is this a joke at the giver's expense?

No, if it stays about the object and not the person.

The print names the size, not who chose it. Kept that way, it reads as wry rather than pointed — the wearer's private acknowledgement of a fact both people already know, never spoken about, never printed as a complaint. The moment it names a person or the year it happened, it stops being about a tag and starts being about a mistake, which is a different and worse shirt.

Does it print well?

Yes, and small is doing the work here, not detail.

A tag at badge scale needs to survive being read from a metre away, so the lettering has to be plain, heavy and short — SIZE M rather than a paragraph. Kept to two inks on a slate or charcoal base, with the rest of the garment left bare, the tag reads as an actual label rather than a graphic, which is exactly what it's imitating.

How do I get one made?

Give the size at JustOG — just the label, set plainly, placed where a real tag would never be. Pick a direction, drag the crop frame, see it composited on the real garment, and it's made to order and shipped.

Designs other people have published are in the shop.

It's been the wrong size for three years. It still gets worn on Tuesdays.