generally speaking, the majority of people have bodies that roughly correspond to their bra sizes. So a 34 will have a body that starts at a size 10 but has considerable stretch in – for example, I have a 34 top half and a size 14 bottom half, and have no problems wearing the 34's, or indeed the 32's on occasion. Unless you have a very unusual division of sizes – I have a friend who is a 34 on her top half and an 18+ on her bottom, and she goes for the longline girdle instead – the Vargas will fit fine.
thanks,
Catherine

ah . . . the girdle sizing is my fault. When we started we used me as a fit model, because at the time I was roughly a 34B and about a 10 heading on for a 12 on the hips. Around the time we developed the girdle, I'd got roughly a dress size bigger, and hadn't really noticed – I worked in an eating disorder unit for 4 years, so I'm extremely well trained in not obsessing over weight and size, plus I have an inexplicable ability to look like I have a much smaller bum than I actually do! What this meant was that all the girdles came out at least 1 size bigger than they were labelled. We sorted it out on runs since then, so the small is now the same as the rest of our smalls, but the longline girdles start at a waist size of 24 inches. Our usual sizing is outlines here: http://www.kissmedeadly.co.uk/about/sizing
The Vargas dresses, being bra sized, do go down lower than this in the waist.
Whilst I recognise that there are smaller ladies who want shapewear, its quite a small market (no pun intended), and we've generally found that lines that run large tend to sell through better than lines that run small for us. We can't add an extra size to our range without adding about 30% to our minimum spend for producing a range, because of the way manufacturers work, so it hasn't been financially feasible to extend the sizing range so far. But, we've just started to manufacture some of the shapewear in the UK, where we can do smaller quantities, so it is something we're looking at again.
thanks,
Catherine

I'm sorry to hear you had a bad experience with the Vargas. I would never argue that our things are right for everyone; its like jeans, some styles work for some figures, others not so much.
With respect to customer service . . . well, the fact that I'm answering this many moons after it was written probably gives you some idea how pushed for time we were/are. I think at the point you wrote this there was me (disabled, works from home doing the design and management and whatnot) and then we had one person stuck in a warehouse in Sheffield part time parcelling out goods. We actually abandoned the catalogues because firstly, our stock levels shifted to be a reliable way to show what people could have, and secondly, as you rightly point out, they often never arrived. Plus at the time we were focussed on wholesale, not retail; so customer service was more concentrated on retailers rather than individuals.

If you want super supportive retro foundation wear, by the way, I really recommend the Rago products. Ours are designed to be the kind of thing you can wear to eat a big meal in and then dance in, Rago will give you a completely different shape instead!

Alison x

Alison