Buying This Shop as a Gift, With No Size Chart to Lean On

Buying clothes for somebody else is a guess at the best of times. Doing it from a shop that publishes no measurements at all turns it into a slightly bigger guess, and that’s roughly where anybody browsing Crooks and Castles for a present ends up standing, because the size selector offers six letters and the page underneath them offers nothing else to go on.

So the question quietly changes shape. It stops being what size they take and becomes which pieces survive a wrong guess. Some do. Some really don’t. And the difference doesn’t show up in a product photograph, which is why I’d think it through before spending CA$⁠130 on something nobody can put right afterwards.

Six letters, and nothing underneath them

Small at one end, triple extra large at the other, four letters in between. That selector sits on more or less every one of the eighty-five products here, across tees, hoodies, sweatshirts, shorts and sweatpants. What doesn’t sit beside it is a chest figure, a body length, a sleeve measurement, or a line telling you how the cut runs, and nobody has printed a fabric weight beside any of it either.

I’d rather say that plainly. No chart hides in a tab somewhere — the shop simply doesn’t publish one, so a gift buyer who normally lines a chest measurement up against the recipient’s favourite hoodie has nothing on this site to line anything up against. You work from the photographs, the cut words in the product name, and what you already know about the person.

Pieces that forgive a wrong guess

Loose shapes carry the mistake for you, basically. A boxy tee that lands a letter big still reads as a boxy tee, which is pretty much the look that it was after in the first place, and the sweatshirts described as oversized — the Gothic Elite Oversized Sweatshirt, the CRKS Dolman Boxy Sweatshirt — hang loose by design, so an extra size mostly vanishes into the drape instead of announcing itself across the shoulders.

• a boxy or oversized tee, where a size up looks like the cut it was aiming for
• the pullover hoodies in fleece, which hang off the shoulder rather than sitting on it
• the dolman sweatshirts, since a low armhole covers a multitude of guesses
• shorts on a drawcord waist, which adjust themselves within reason

And the ones that don’t

Sweatpants are where a guess turns costly. CA$⁠145 buys the Gold Medusa Sweatpants or the Castles Leg Print pair, and a waistband that came out too big slides down all day, while one that came out too small just never leaves the drawer. No drawcord rescues a rise or an inseam that landed wrong. Length catches people out.

A tracksuit doubles the whole problem. At CA$⁠210 the Core Logo and Logo Tracksuits have to work on the top and the bottom at the same moment, off a single letter, which gives you two chances to get it wrong for one price. If the person isn’t standing beside you while you order, I’d leave the sets alone and spend the CA$⁠210 somewhere safer.

The exchange isn’t the safety net you’d hope for

Now the awkward part, which I’d rather flag than let somebody discover in January. The shipping and returns pages on this site read as boilerplate borrowed from a completely different shop: they name cities on the far side of the world, quote money in a currency this shop doesn’t bill in, and refer to product lines the catalogue has never stocked. I won’t repeat a single figure off them, because those terms plainly aren’t this store’s.

So the swap-it-later plan isn’t really a plan. Whatever this shop’s actual delivery and returns terms are, they belong on its own policy pages rather than in anything I could responsibly repeat, and the order address printed on the site is support@crooksncastles.ca, so one question asked before you pay costs you nothing. My own approach would be to choose as though no exchange existed at all, and then treat one as a bonus if it turns out to be there.

The graphic is the bigger gamble anyway

Sizing soaks up all the worry and honestly it probably shouldn’t. A hoodie a letter too big still gets worn. A Medusa motif sprawling across the chest, or the sentence on a God Guns Money tee, either suits the person or lives in a drawer forever, and guessing that from the outside is far harder than guessing a letter in a dropdown.

So I’d weight it the other way round from most people. Pick the quietest version of something they already wear — the Box Logo Hoodie, the Skull Bunny Logo Hoodie, the Claw 02 Hoodie, a mark on the chest rather than a full illustration — and let the size come second. A small screen print makes a safer present than an embroidered statement across the back, even when the embroidery is clearly the nicer piece of work.

Gift questions that keep coming up

What letter do I pick if I genuinely have no idea?

Whatever they’d choose in a hoodie from anywhere else is the sanest starting point, and on a loose piece I’d take the larger of the two letters you’re torn between. On anything fitted I wouldn’t pick either — I’d buy a tee and sidestep the question.

Which piece is the safest present in the whole catalogue?

A tee, pretty much. CA$⁠99 to CA$⁠110 keeps the money at risk small, the cut forgives a letter in either direction, and a graphic that lands badly becomes the cheapest mistake in the shop rather than the dearest one. Something like the Checkerboard or the Califas tee is about as uncontroversial as that rack gets.

Is the tracksuit worth it as a bigger present?

Only when you know their size properly, from something they already own. CA$⁠210 is a lot of money riding on one letter that has to suit a jacket and a pair of trousers simultaneously, and no part of the listing tells you how either half has been shaped.

Gift buying from this catalogue comes down to two choices made in this order: a forgiving shape first, a quiet graphic second, with the size treated as the smaller of the risks rather than the whole decision. A fleece pullover or a logo tee in black, somewhere between CA$⁠99 and CA$⁠130, gets worn. A CA$⁠210 set bought on a hunch might sit folded for a year. And because the returns side of this shop can’t be read with any confidence, the cautious pick is also the generous one — nobody has ever minded a hoodie that hung a little loose.