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Speaker 1: Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve Camray.

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Speaker 1: It's ready. Are you welcome to stuff mom never told you?

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Speaker 1: From house top boards dot Com. Hey there, and welcome

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Speaker 1: to the podcast. This is Smiley and I'm Kristen. And Kristen.

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Speaker 1: I was thinking of an anecdote today. Uh, one time Christmas.

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Speaker 1: My family is sitting around playing this card game and

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Speaker 1: redraw Card. It's got like a deep question and it

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Speaker 1: helps you learn things about other people. It was very meaningful,

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Speaker 1: except my family is a little sarcastic. So when the

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Speaker 1: question what do you like least about your gender came up,

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Speaker 1: my brother responded that the thing he liked least about

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Speaker 1: being male was that he always had to walk to

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Speaker 1: the back of department stores to get to the men's department.

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Speaker 1: That was his biggest complaint. Wow, yeah, well, life must

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Speaker 1: be good for the Edmunds brothers. But I have to

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Speaker 1: say when he said it, there were these like nods

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Speaker 1: of recognition from all the guys in the room, like, yeah,

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Speaker 1: it is kind of a bummer to have to walk

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Speaker 1: to the back of the department store. But I was thinking,

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Speaker 1: at least when he gets there, shopping is easy. Oh, yeah,

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Speaker 1: they know, they just have to know they're whatever inch

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Speaker 1: inch size, waist size, leg links. It seems like two numbers,

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Speaker 1: like thirty two by thirty six. You know, I don't

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Speaker 1: know what those mean, but it seems very standardized. Yeah,

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Speaker 1: whereas if we were to walk into a department store

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Speaker 1: right now, pick out five different brands of jeans, same size,

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Speaker 1: guarantee you right now, maybe one of those would fit.

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Speaker 1: Well yeah, oh maybe maybe it's a long time for

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Speaker 1: girls to shop. Yeah. Men and women can both relate

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Speaker 1: to this, women who obviously are buying clothes themselves and

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Speaker 1: men who have valiantly made the attempt to buy clothes

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Speaker 1: for women. Um, it is. It is hard. It is

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Speaker 1: a strange and confusing world of numbers and sizes that

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Speaker 1: just really don't add up. They don't add up. You

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Speaker 1: might be, you know, a size six in one store,

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Speaker 1: size eight from another store, maybe even the same store.

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Speaker 1: You have to buy like three different sizes. I don't

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Speaker 1: know what size and nam anymore. I just I just

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Speaker 1: try to get into a zen state before I walk

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Speaker 1: into a store and just let it take me. Just

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Speaker 1: go in there with this main clothes you can handle

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Speaker 1: and interesting enough. Christ and I when we were researching

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Speaker 1: women's clothing sizes. Both took a survey that kind of

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Speaker 1: question like what kind of fits we liked, kind of

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Speaker 1: styles we liked, and Kristen, You've got like sixty five

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Speaker 1: possible gene styles would fit you. Yeah, sixty five genes.

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Speaker 1: It was fine, Like it's like, oh, yeah, I answer

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Speaker 1: all these questions, We'll find the perfect pair or sixty

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Speaker 1: five pairs of genes. Yeah, I got seventy two gene results.

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Speaker 1: There's no way I'm trying on seventy two genes not

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Speaker 1: gonna happen. So let's get to the bottom of this.

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Speaker 1: Why are women's clothing size is so hard to decipher?

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Speaker 1: Why are they why they started to figure out why

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Speaker 1: can't it be like the good old days, by which

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Speaker 1: I mean the priest Civil War days. Yes, I don't

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Speaker 1: know if I call them the good old days, but

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Speaker 1: but yes, the Civil War does have a lot to

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Speaker 1: do with the standardization of clothing sizes. Before then, a

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Speaker 1: lot of clothes were either made in the home or

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Speaker 1: if you were wealthy enough, you could have a tailor

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Speaker 1: make clothes for you. But with the Civil War, soldiers

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Speaker 1: needed uniforms obviously, and home production couldn't exactly keep up

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Speaker 1: with demand, and so then you start having the mass

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Speaker 1: production of uniforms, which then led to standardized standardization of

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Speaker 1: men's sizes because they're like, well, if this would be

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Speaker 1: a lot easier if we could just kind of you know,

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Speaker 1: stamp out different sizes of men's uniforms and send them off. Yeah,

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Speaker 1: they took all that data. After the Civil War, men

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Speaker 1: could buy ready made clothes. Women didn't follow until about

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Speaker 1: the nineteen twenties, and that's when you know, industrious industrialization

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Speaker 1: excuse me, was picking up, and you know, companies started

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Speaker 1: trying to appeal to women, being like, by this dress,

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Speaker 1: it's already made for you. Yeah, you've got the growing

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Speaker 1: urban middle class that that's able to afford more of

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Speaker 1: these clothes. Just you know, advertising is starting to take off.

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Speaker 1: All of these forces combining to to kick off the

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Speaker 1: whole retail industry. But they were making all these ready

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Speaker 1: make clothes with absolutely no data about women's bodies. So

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Speaker 1: you would send off for your dress, they'd mail it back,

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Speaker 1: it would it would look like you know, a burlap

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Speaker 1: sack on you, not necessarily in texture, which is kind

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Speaker 1: of how a lot of clothes I put on now

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Speaker 1: that I think are my size look on me but

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Speaker 1: burn clothes. So between nineteen and nineteen fifty two, the

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Speaker 1: Mail Order Association of America in conjunction with the National

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Speaker 1: Bureau of Standards, organized this massive survey of women's measurements

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Speaker 1: and they collected all of the data. I think it

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Speaker 1: was sixteen thousand women that participated in this study, uh,

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Speaker 1: to figure out what exactly women's clothing sizes were. Yeah,

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Speaker 1: and they also took some data during World War Two

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Speaker 1: from what the Women's Army Corps. They used the volunteer

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Speaker 1: years from that organization to also you know, feed into

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Speaker 1: the data. But regardless where the data came from, it

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Speaker 1: was mostly from young Caucasian women, not very ethnically diverse results,

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Speaker 1: not taking into account how your body changes as you age.

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Speaker 1: It was sort of these very small subsets of women

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Speaker 1: who determined the original standard sizes, right, but nevertheless they

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Speaker 1: would take They took fifty nine measurements from each volunteer

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Speaker 1: and the studies were published um by the U. S

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Speaker 1: d A under the title Women's Measurements for Garments and

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Speaker 1: Pattern Construction, and those are still used today. If you're

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Speaker 1: a sewer, patterns that you buy in the store still

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Speaker 1: use those original sizes, which go from eight to thirty eight.

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Speaker 1: But one thing that you'll notice if and I I can,

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Speaker 1: I can speak personally to this. My mom was a seamstress,

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Speaker 1: still is a seamstress, and she would make dresses for

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Speaker 1: me and I remember we a couple of years ago.

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Speaker 1: I wanted I wanted to dress, and we decided that

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Speaker 1: we would we would work on one together, and so

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Speaker 1: we went to the store and picking out the pattern.

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Speaker 1: Finding the right size. Pattern was slightly traumatic because since

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Speaker 1: it's based on these old body measurements, I had to

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Speaker 1: go up a few sizes than I normally would. You're

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Speaker 1: wearing a thirty eight. Yeah, I wasn't. I wasn't very honestly,

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Speaker 1: wasn't very happy about it. But it's because, like you said,

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Speaker 1: it's really just patterns that are that follow these standards now,

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Speaker 1: because if you walk into a store an eight back

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Speaker 1: in nine certainly isn't the eight that you'll find today.

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Speaker 1: And the very reason that happened is probably because of

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Speaker 1: how you felt when you bought that pattern for your dress.

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Speaker 1: Is it made you feel bad about a number, and

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Speaker 1: so you know, brands figured out that women don't want

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Speaker 1: to buy clothing that's really high up on the scale. So,

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Speaker 1: as Kristen said, what was a size eight may now

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Speaker 1: be a size zero simply because people have figured out

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Speaker 1: that women are vain about what size they are, right,

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Speaker 1: And I think what you're referring to is vanity sizing.

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Speaker 1: Vanity sizing, and it's it's sort of a hot topic

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Speaker 1: of debate in the fashion world. I've read some arguments

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Speaker 1: this week that people who say it doesn't exist are

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Speaker 1: the people who say there's no way it doesn't exist

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Speaker 1: when their stores they're selling size zero's size like zero zero. Yeah,

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Speaker 1: it's small. There's a definite trend. I mean, according to

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Speaker 1: an article on msnbc dot com, a size eight in

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Speaker 1: nineteen fifty translated to a size four in the nineteen seventies,

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Speaker 1: and today that same size eight is a double zero,

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Speaker 1: which is kind of hard to believe when you consider

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Speaker 1: a statistic UH from the U. S Department of Health

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Speaker 1: and Human Services, as reported in Real Simple magazine, looked

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Speaker 1: at women from nineteen sixty two to two thousand and two,

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Speaker 1: and their height had gone up one inch and their

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Speaker 1: weight had gone up more than twenty four pounds. So

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Speaker 1: we're somehow getting bigger and our clothes are getting smaller. Right.

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Speaker 1: I think the average woman's size today is a fourteen. Yeah,

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Speaker 1: Whereas it used to be the eight was the was

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Speaker 1: considered the the average average size. But I guarantee you

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Speaker 1: if you try to go vintage shopping and you put

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Speaker 1: on an eight, uh, it's gonna be tight. But it's

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Speaker 1: interesting you mentioned the size of eight, Kristen, because we're

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Speaker 1: reading about how close our size today and manufacturers work

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Speaker 1: off the assumption that eight is sort of the midpoint,

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Speaker 1: despite the fact that, as you say, it's probably closer

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Speaker 1: to fourteen, right, Molly. According to Tim Gunn of Project

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Speaker 1: Runway Fame, uh, the process for even designing a woman's

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Speaker 1: garment starts with the designer making a sketch of the

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Speaker 1: idea and then uh, they enlist a quote unquote fit model,

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Speaker 1: who is a person who represents the company's ideal midpoint size,

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Speaker 1: which is, like you said, that size eight. But this

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Speaker 1: is where it might get tricky because different designers might

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Speaker 1: use a different silhouette. Some fit models might have, you know,

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Speaker 1: broader shoulders or narrower hips, or larger thighs, whatever, whatever

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Speaker 1: it is. Because each designer has an idea of how

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Speaker 1: they want their garments to look on our bodies. So

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Speaker 1: that's why you you still get variations even among the

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Speaker 1: fit size eight. Right. And you know, because these women

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Speaker 1: their job is to be a size eight, they may

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Speaker 1: not be a size eight like a real world women.

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Speaker 1: A real world woman is a size eight, right, because

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Speaker 1: you could walk into any number of stores in the

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Speaker 1: size aid could actually fit all different sizes of them.

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Speaker 1: And but as you say, the designers do care how

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Speaker 1: their clothes look, which is why I'm guessing. I mean,

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Speaker 1: I don't want to point any fingers, but I think

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Speaker 1: that the designers seem to care more about how the

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Speaker 1: clothes look for the smaller sizes, and then they just

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Speaker 1: kind of multiply up for the heavier sizes. Yeah, they

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Speaker 1: try to do everything in uh in proportion, like as

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Speaker 1: the as the waiste gets larger than the arms get longer.

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Speaker 1: But it's really not even know, Yeah, that's not how

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Speaker 1: our our bodies grow. So now today we have this

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Speaker 1: situation where sizes are just all over the place, and

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Speaker 1: some governments want to do something about it. Yeah, this

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Speaker 1: is a time and we should be modeling Spain. Yeah,

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Speaker 1: Spain has really can taking the lead in this women's

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Speaker 1: clothing size standardization because if you remember, I believe it

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Speaker 1: was in two thousand seven, Spain actually banned um extremely

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Speaker 1: thin models from walking the catwalk in there in their

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Speaker 1: fashion week, and the Minister of Health then took it

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Speaker 1: one step further by calling for the standardization of women's

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Speaker 1: clothing sizes based on these real world female measurements because

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Speaker 1: he thought that it reflected poorly on or promoted poor

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Speaker 1: body image for younger consumers especially, and he was calling

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Speaker 1: for this not only from mass market retailers but also

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Speaker 1: for the smaller designers as well, so that an eight

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Speaker 1: isn't eight, isn't eight, no matter where you shop. So

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Speaker 1: it'll be interesting to see how how that actually plays out.

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Speaker 1: And there have also been efforts in the US and

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Speaker 1: the UK as well, Molly too kind of revamp the

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Speaker 1: the initial survey that we were talking about that took

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Speaker 1: place um in at the mid century to update those

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Speaker 1: clothing sizes because, like you said, it was mostly Caucasian women,

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Speaker 1: which is not representative of the population. Yeah, and you

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Speaker 1: know what's cool about this, Christen, They used scanners. Scanners, yes,

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Speaker 1: full body scanners, Like there's this company h they have

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Speaker 1: what's it called the T two t TC two TC

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Speaker 1: two T two is the terminator sequel um. So you'd

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Speaker 1: walk into the scanner and all this like uh technology,

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Speaker 1: bursts of white light that I don't quite understand. Text

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Speaker 1: stuff can cover this for us. Yeah, well I'm Christians

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Speaker 1: just looking at me blankly when I started talking about

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Speaker 1: white light. But white light would capture your body and

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Speaker 1: would make your body into like a series of dots essentially,

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Speaker 1: and then the manufacturers would know how two dots were related,

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Speaker 1: and that would be the measurement, as opposed to just

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Speaker 1: putting a tape measure around your waist and calling that

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Speaker 1: your measurement. They would look at ratios, they would look

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Speaker 1: at where things were located and which things were higher

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Speaker 1: and lower on some people, um, and that was how

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Speaker 1: they would do measurements. So the vision some of these

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Speaker 1: it put on like a hard drive, and you could

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Speaker 1: walk around the stores and put it into like their

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Speaker 1: scanner complementary device. I guess and say, this is my body,

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Speaker 1: find clothes that fit me, and you can find the

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Speaker 1: exact clothes. But that isn't that's not exactly how things

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Speaker 1: have happened. That does not sound cheap. So I'm guessing

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Speaker 1: that was one factor in scanning technology not really getting

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Speaker 1: off the ground. But one thing that didn't come out

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Speaker 1: of this, I believe it was the size USA was

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Speaker 1: the name of this survey, including the white light high

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Speaker 1: tech scanners that we obviously know a lot about. Um

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Speaker 1: was that it intentionally included more minority women. They actively

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Speaker 1: sought out African American women, Latino women, who now make

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Speaker 1: up a much larger percentage of the population than they

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Speaker 1: did in the nineteen fifties, to actually get a representative

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Speaker 1: look at what a woman's body in the US looks like.

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Speaker 1: And you know, they're finding that women are like snowflakes.

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Speaker 1: There really are no to a like. I don't know

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Speaker 1: we'll ever get to the point where a size eight

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Speaker 1: is a size eight is a size eight. But I

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Speaker 1: think the important thing that could come out of this

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Speaker 1: is that we learned that size eight is not the midpoint.

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Speaker 1: The study found that only ten percent or less than

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Speaker 1: ten percent and women met an ideal size eight, So

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Speaker 1: that should not be the standard for which we based

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Speaker 1: all our clothing sizes, right, And there was an article

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Speaker 1: on this in the Atlantic Vie Virginia postural, and there

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Speaker 1: was an interesting quote that she uh that she made

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Speaker 1: which said that clothing creates the illusion that bodies fit

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Speaker 1: an esthetically pleasing form, that clothes actually cover up the

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Speaker 1: natural shape of our bodies. And I think that's important

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Speaker 1: to keep in mind, Like you said, bodies as it's

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Speaker 1: kind of cheesy as it sounds, bodies are like snowflakes.

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Speaker 1: There's not an actual standard size of a woman's body.

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Speaker 1: With a man, it might be easier to to break

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Speaker 1: it down into a waste and you know, in seam

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Speaker 1: but there we just had a lot more curves to

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Speaker 1: work with, Molly. Let's face it, we do, so you know,

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Speaker 1: it's it's kind of an unfortunate end to the podcast

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Speaker 1: because we don't have any sort of grand solution for this.

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Speaker 1: You really do have to basically try on all these

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Speaker 1: sizes and I find want that fits right and if

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Speaker 1: you feel crazy that you're walking into a store and

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Speaker 1: you put on you know, the size eight, and maybe

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Speaker 1: fact matter is it might be bigger than it used

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Speaker 1: to be because as you know, Americans are growing larger.

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Speaker 1: Um companies are trying to cater to that by by

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Speaker 1: downsizing their sizes. You're not You're not crazy, No, not crazy.

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Speaker 1: It's just women's clothing sizes are not standard. Going back

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Speaker 1: to that initial standardizing effort that we were talking about

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Speaker 1: that started really in the early twentieth century, that was

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Speaker 1: thrown out completely in Yeah, it just wasn't it wasn't accurate. Yeah,

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Speaker 1: so we might see I don't know, maybe in the

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Speaker 1: next few years, with the Size USA survey and all

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Speaker 1: these fantastic scanners we have, we might see maybe a

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Speaker 1: little more standardization. But I gotta say, don't hold your

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Speaker 1: breath for for a while. We can move to Spain,

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Speaker 1: because we to Spain. I'd love to move to Spain.

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Speaker 1: They have afternoon naps, yes, don Ces and Molly before

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Speaker 1: we before we go head out and try to sneak

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Speaker 1: a SISA and how stuff works offices. I have to

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Speaker 1: say something to men, because the idea for this podcast

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Speaker 1: came from a male listener who was asking about women's

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Speaker 1: clothing sizes. And you know what, um, take all of this,

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Speaker 1: take all of this to heart. When you're thinking about

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Speaker 1: whether or not you want to buy a lady in

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Speaker 1: your life a piece of clothing, Maybe you just stick

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Speaker 1: with perfume or shoes. Shoes sizes, those are easy to

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Speaker 1: figure out, yeah, um, or just take her with you,

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Speaker 1: Take her with you maybe to a tailor. Yeah, so

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Speaker 1: you can get some romantic honey, We're gonna go to

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Speaker 1: a tailor, so you're close hip perfectly to a habadasha. Well,

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Speaker 1: if you want to learn more about clothing style and

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Speaker 1: just good old fashioned anatomy, you can head over to

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Speaker 1: how stuff works dot com. And as always, if you

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Speaker 1: have a question or comment for me and Molly, please

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Speaker 1: send us an email at mom stuff at how stuff

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Speaker 1: works dot com. And finally, if you want to read

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Speaker 1: even more stuff that is on mine and Molly's minds,

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Speaker 1: you should check out our new blog called how to

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Speaker 1: Stuff and of course you can find that at how

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Speaker 1: stuff works dot com. For more on this and thousands

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Speaker 1: of other topics, is it how stuff works dot com.

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Speaker 1: Want more how stuff works, check out our blogs on

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Speaker 1: the house stuff works dot com home page. Brought to

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Speaker 1: you by the reinvented two thousand twelve camera. It's ready,

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