Auntie Kate The Resale Expert

Last week, as you know, I was a Fairy Godmother for our local Cinderella Project, helping teens in need to select a prom gown for their big evening. Besides the difficulty of finding JUST the right dress for just the right less-than-accommodating teen, we had to deal with the wide variety of sizes.

Sizing has always been haphazard, but lately, sizes have been growing too. Last I checked, a 6Petite wouldn’t have had a 28″+ waist measurement. No wonder there’s 00s nowadays, when ten years ago a single 0 was a rare commodity.

So, researching, I found out the whole size problem is due, as usual, to men. Men focusing on men. Here:

By the War of 1812, the Army was in the practice of holding stocks of ready-made uniforms sized according to a single measurement, of the chest—based on the assumption that you could deduce from it a proportional understanding of the rest of a man’s body. So, when manufacturers in the early 20^th century began to produce women’s clothing, they based women’s sizes exclusively on a single measurement: the bust. Read the full article.

And can you imagine how many times women’s busts have changed, migrated up and down, on their bodies in the intervening 200 years?

No wonder our sizing standards are all busted up!