Women’s Apparel: And Thus Began The Practice Of Vanity Sizing
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Consumers and the booming catalog industry, that proliferated as Americans moved to more rural areas were ready for change.
Any subject matron, maid, scrubwoman, show girl might be in 59 different places, the article read.
In a 1939 article titled No Boondoggling, TIME explored the Department of Agriculture’s effort to standardize women’s clothes, an effort that had been inspired by the fact that manufacturers guessed it was costing them $ 10 million a year not to have set sizes. In 1958, let’s say, a size 8 corresponded with a bust of 31 inches, a waist of 23 dot 5 inches and a hip girth of 32 dot 5 inches. Across the world of women’s clothing, a 4 is a 2 is a Everything is relative unless, definitely, you’re shopping in Brandy Melville’s teen friendly SoHo store, where a single size is small.
The most infuriating American pastimes occurs within the confines of a dressing room.
Sit down, unbutton your pants and enjoy a condensed briefing on women’s clothing measurements.
And now here’s the question. Where do these seemingly arbitrary sizes come from? So it’s a modal window. That said, this modal can be closed by pressing the Escape key or activating the close button. It was largely made up of women of a lower socioeconomic status who needed the participation fee, since the survey was done on a volunteer basis.
It was also primarily white women. Whenever assuming women had a hourglass figure, the measurements still primarily relied on bust size. It’s an interesting fact that the data of 15000 women was collected by Ruth O’Brien and William Shelton, and while the project was impressive especially considering they didn’t have computers to analyze the data, Boorady says it didn’t exactly solve the serious issue. Did you know that a private organization called ASTM International began publishing its own sizing tables in 1995. Over the decades, government size guidelines were heeded less and less, items of clothing began getting marked with lower numbers and eventually, in 1983, the Department of Commerce withdrew its commercial women’s clothing size standard altogether. Of course, did egos, as American girth increased. Seriously. Thus began the practice of vanity sizing. Whenever representing catalog businesses including Sears Roebuck, enlisted the help of the National Bureau of Standards to reanalyze the sizing often using the measurements of women who had served in the air force, quite a few most fit people in the country creating a 1958 standard that was largely arbitrary, in the late 1940s, the Mail Order Association of America.
