--- title: The Evolution of Women's Clothing Sizes | TIME description: Why it's impossible to find women's clothes that fit, and how to fix it. Inside the fight to take back the fitting room. canonical: https://time.com/video/WnDMWIcb/ og:title: The Evolution of Women's Clothing Sizes og:description: Why it's impossible to find women's clothes that fit, and how to fix it. Inside the fight to take back the fitting room. og:url: https://time.com/video/WnDMWIcb/ og:image: https://cdn.jwplayer.com/v2/media/WnDMWIcb/poster.jpg?width=720 og:type: video.other twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: The Evolution of Women's Clothing Sizes twitter:description: Why it's impossible to find women's clothes that fit, and how to fix it. Inside the fight to take back the fitting room. twitter:image: https://cdn.jwplayer.com/v2/media/WnDMWIcb/poster.jpg?width=720 --- # The Evolution of Women's Clothing Sizes > Sponsored content. Supplied in partnership with TIME. 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They are at time.com/newsletters and are separate from a paid subscription. ## Video: The Evolution of Women's Clothing Sizes [Watch (HLS stream): The Evolution of Women's Clothing Sizes](https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/WnDMWIcb.m3u8) (1:26)  _Published 2016-09-01. Why it's impossible to find women's clothes that fit, and how to fix it. Inside the fight to take back the fitting room._ --- Jul 27, 2023 8:42 PM UTC --- ## More From This Series [All Videos](https://time.com/video/) [Women’s Clothing Chain Dressbarn to Close its 650 Stores](/video/nVjExQuR/) ### Women’s Clothing Chain Dressbarn to Close its 650 Stores [4 Affordable Size-Inclusive Clothing Brands](/video/XuEiMaRq/) ### 4 Affordable Size-Inclusive Clothing Brands [The Seventies: Women's Lib](/video/x9o3a2sz/) ### The Seventies: Women's Lib --- ## Transcript Clothing sizes are a modern problem. For most of human history, well to do women had their clothes custom made and less fortunate women sewed their own frocks. Ready to wear clothes didn't come to prominence in America until the Depression when few could afford food, let alone fabric The industrial boom of World War II ushered in the rise of factory made clothes and department store and catalogs. Sizes were born. In the late 1950s, the government tried to suggest a universal sizing standard, but it didn't work, because it was based exclusively on the measurements of white women's bodies. And America was becoming more diverse. With no rules to determine sizes, brands began to vanity size. As the weight of the average American woman grows, brands adjusted their metrics to help more customers squeeze into more desirable sizes. A size 8 in 1958 was a size 00 by 2011. This has led to a wide variance in clothing sizes Dresses labeled as a size eight today, can vary in the bust by as much as three inches. And that's just part of the problem. Many brands don't go beyond a size 12. Meaning it's harder for curvier women to find clothes. But that's starting to change thanks in part to new clothing collections. Including ones from celebrities like Sophia Vergara and Melissa McCarthy, which aim to be more inclusive. [ MUSIC ] ```json {"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"VideoObject","name":"The Evolution of Women's Clothing Sizes","description":"Why it's impossible to find women's clothes that fit, and how to fix it. Inside the fight to take back the fitting room.\n","thumbnailUrl":"https://cdn.jwplayer.com/v2/media/WnDMWIcb/poster.jpg?width=720","uploadDate":"2016-09-01T00:48:02.000Z","contentUrl":"https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/WnDMWIcb.m3u8","embedUrl":"https://time.com/video/WnDMWIcb/","duration":"PT1M26S","potentialAction":{"@type":"SeekToAction","target":"https://time.com/video/WnDMWIcb/?jw_start={seek_to_second_number}","startOffset-input":"required name=seek_to_second_number"}} ```