Reaching a person.

This service does not answer that question, and it is important to be plain about why rather than to hedge.

What it reads is construction: the width of a lapel, where the gorge sits, how a fly closes, whether a seam was overlocked. Each of those points to a period, and where several of them agree is the reading. Sometimes the clues cannot all be true of one making — a nylon coil zip in a garment whose cut reads twenty-five years earlier, say. When that happens the clash is reported at the top of the result, together with what such a clash usually means: a garment made later to an earlier pattern, or a part replaced during the garment's life.

That is an observation about construction. It is not an authentication finding, and it must not be relied on as one. A garment made later to an older pattern is a legitimate object with its own history, not a lesser one. If money is going to change hands, take the garment to a specialist who will examine it in person.

This service gives no valuation of any kind, and it has no view on whether you should buy or sell anything.

Period is only one of many things that bear on what a garment is worth, alongside condition, size, cloth, maker, completeness, provenance and what someone happens to want on the day. A period interval on its own tells you very little about value, and a tool that produced one would be pretending to a competence it does not have.

The terms of service prohibit using anything produced here in a sale description, an auction catalogue entry, an authenticity claim or an insurance valuation.

Because a range is what the evidence supports. Every construction feature in the reference table points to a span of years, not to a date; the reading is the span where enough of those features can all be true at once.

A single year would be a stronger claim than the method can carry, and it would be unarguable — which is the real problem with it. Period readings are revised all the time, by people who know more than any table does. A range with its workings shown can be challenged feature by feature. A year cannot.

Where the overlap is narrow, the result says so and says which features made it narrow. Where it is wide, the result says that too.

No. Photographs you upload are not used to train or fine-tune any model, ours or anyone else's, and they are not shared with third parties for that purpose.

They are held only as long as needed to produce and re-open your reading. On the Free and Era plans, uploads and their readings are deleted ninety days after the reading is produced. On Archive, records are kept for as long as the collection is active and are deleted ninety days after you delete the record or close the account, whichever is earlier.

You can delete any reading and its uploads at any time from the reading room, and you can delete everything at once from the billing page. The privacy notice sets out the legal bases, the retention periods and how to ask for a copy of your data.

The image step proposes which construction features it can see in a photograph. That step can be wrong: a photograph flattens, padding and cloth weight are hard to judge from an image, and a badly lit close-up will read a besom pocket as a flap.

The dating step is not a model at all. Every interval comes from a published reference table, and the overlap and the clash detection are computed in your browser from those numbers, so a reading can be recomputed by hand and checked. If a feature has been misread you can remove it from the reading and the interval recomputes in front of you.

Regional variation, workroom habit, bespoke and theatrical cutting, alterations and later reproductions all distort the clues, and the service cannot see any of them. Every result carries a list of what it cannot know.

The service reads garments, not people. Photographs containing a person are refused at upload, and nothing produced here contains a human figure.

It also gives no advice on whether a garment suits you, how to wear it or what to wear it with. That is a different service, and this is not it.

You can cancel from the billing page at any time, in one step, with no telephone call and no retention flow. Cancelling stops the next renewal; your plan continues to the end of the period you have paid for.

As a consumer in the United Kingdom you normally have 14 days to cancel a subscription to digital services and receive a refund. At checkout you are asked, in two separate boxes that are not pre-ticked, whether you want the service to start immediately, and whether you accept that starting immediately means you lose that 14-day right once the service has been fully performed. If you do not tick them, the service starts after the 14 days and your right is untouched. Both statements are repeated in the confirmation email.

Beyond that, we go further than the law currently requires: every renewal is preceded by a reminder email sent on its own, and a fresh 14-day cancellation period runs from each renewal. Full detail is on the cancellation page.

Credits are a measure of service use. They are issued for the month in which they apply, they do not carry over, and there is no way to buy more separately — there are no credit packs and no stored balance. If you run out, you can move to a higher plan or wait for the next month.

Credits are not money, are not stored value, cannot be redeemed for cash and cannot be transferred to anyone else.

A wide interval comes from a single whole-garment photograph, and that is what the free plan gives you. Narrowing depends on detail: a button, a pocket mouth, a fly, a hem, each contributing its own interval, and the overlap tightening as they stack up.

Paid plans read many detail close-ups against the whole garment in one pass. That is also the only way clashes surface at all — you cannot see that two clues disagree unless both are being read at the same time.

Prices are shown in US dollars and include VAT at 20%.

Yes. Accounts are for people aged 18 or over. The service is not directed at children and accounts are not knowingly opened for anyone under 18.

No. The terms of service expressly prohibit using anything produced here in a sale description, an auction catalogue entry, an authenticity claim, an insurance valuation, or as the basis for buying or selling anything.

The service is a research aid for reading construction. For anything with money attached, consult a specialist.

The reference table is drawn from twentieth-century Western tailoring, and it is most reliable on that material. Readings outside it will be wider and the result will say so.

Regional and workroom variation is real in any case: a provincial tailor may be working to a cut a city house left behind a decade earlier. That is listed among the things the service cannot know, on every result.