This is why your dress doesn't fit properly
Marilyn Monroe was famously a size 12, but that meant something very different in the 1950s.
Ask most women what size they wear and they won’t give you a number but a range of numbers. Eight to twelve? Medium to large? Who knows?
That’s because clothing sizes vary wildly between labels, and even from one style to the next. Unlike shoes, there is no reliable way to tell if a garment will fit without actually trying it on.
Data Visualiser Max Galka recently created a graph to show how women’s clothing sizes have changed over time using measurements from the American National Bureau of Standards.
He found that an American size 8 dress is the equivalent of a size 16 dress in 1958, and that a 1958 size 8 is so tiny it doesn’t even have a modern day equivalent - it’s smaller than even a 00.
However, as The Washington Post points out, we can’t just blame vanity sizing and obesity for the widening of busts and waistlines.
“Women's clothing sizes have their roots in a depression-era government project to define the ‘Average American Woman’ by sending a pair of statisticians to survey and measure nearly 15,000 women,” writes Christopher Ingraham.
A small stipend was offered to the women who came in, meaning measurements would likely have been collected from the poorest, most malnourished and thinnest members of society during one of the toughest times in modern American history.
Not only that, but the measurements of non-white women were discarded entirely.
The sizing project was then abandoned until the 1950s, when it was updated with the measurements of army women who had served in World War II. Unsurprisingly, they tended to be fitter than the average American.
The sizing system that was introduced in 1958 consequently catered to a Caucasian woman who sat somewhere between Grapes of Wrath famished and GI Jane buff, and it quickly became obvious that clothes weren't at all reflective of consumers’ bodies.
By 1983, sizing was scrapped all together, leaving companies to their own devices - and shoppers to foot the bill for a lifetime of multiple online returns.
