Why Are Our Clothes Made To Standard Sizes?

Like so much in American life, the standard clothes sizes we use right now will be traced again to the Civil War. If that reply sounds glib, it isn’t meant to be. The Civil Struggle was the pivotal event in American historical past, marking a transition to the trendy era, and heralding adjustments that stood till the 1940s. It even modified the way in which we purchase our clothes.

Antebellum Clothing Sizing

Prior to the Civil Warfare, the overwhelming majority of clothing, for women and men, was tailor-made or dwelling-made. There was a limited number of mass produced, standardized clothing gadgets, primarily jackets, coats, and undergarments, but even these have been solely produced in restricted quantities. For the most half, clothes for males was made on an individual basis. The Civil Warfare modified that.

Mass Producing Uniforms

Throughout the warfare, the Northern and Southern armies each wanted large quantities of uniforms in a hurry. The South, without a big industrial base, relied primarily on dwelling manufacture for uniforms, and through the war Southern armies typically suffered from a scarcity of clothing. The North modified garment making history forever.

It quickly became apparent that the Northern armies could not be supplied with uniforms utilizing traditional modes of clothes production. Thankfully, the North had a nicely developed textile trade that would meet the challenge.

When the government began to contract with factories for mass produced uniforms, the textile manufacturers rapidly realized that they might not make every uniform for a particular soldier. The one option was to standardize the troopers’ uniforms. They despatched tailors to the armies, to measure the lads, and noticed that certain measurements, of arm size, chest dimension, shoulder width, waist size, and inseam length, would appear along with dependable regularity. Using this mass of measurement information, they put together the primary size charts for men’s clothing.

After the Battle

So why didn’t the textile firms return to the older production strategies after the Civil Struggle? The reply lies in profits, as with many things in business. Clothes producers saw that the standardized sizes they had launched considerably diminished the manufacturing value of men’s clothing; slightly than make one item for one man, they might make one dimension of an merchandise, mens jackets for example, for a gaggle of men. Suddenly, clothing was easier to supply, mass production became the staple of discount men’s clothing, and the clothing industry would never be the same again.

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