Sewing Pattern Sizing History

The history of sizing for women’s clothing is interesting, indeed. I knew this favorite book of mine contained a great pattern sizing history, so as a follow-up to last week’s survey of WW2 Fashion, today’s blog post will review these informative facts.

In italics are my comments and questions.  Otherwise, the info is from this great book.

The book:  Fit for Real People by Pati Palmer and Marta Alto gives the very very best review of this topic.  The information I share here, along with the images, comes from that book published by Palmer/Pletsch, pages 11-17.  In my opinion, if you sew garments, you NEED this book!  When ordering, my recommendation is to go with the spiral version.  If you buy the bound version, take it to Kinkos and get it spiralized for easy use.  Of course – easy to find at Amazon.  

This great book sums it up with these words in the sidebar from page 13: 

“Today’s size 12 was yesterday’s size 16 – two sizes smaller.  The 1940’s size 10 is a 2 today – four sizes smaller. “

See so much revealed in this image from the book, page 13: Isn’t it interesting that the evolution to using numbers for sizes originally came from age.  Think of baby’s and children’s clothing even today.

Pattern Sizes Changed Four Times before 1972

Further enlightenment on the size changes is revealed on page 15 in the book.  I clearly remember when, in my early years of sewing, when the sizing changed.  Do you?  At least for those of us who sew, we can generally trust pattern measurement charts to remain the same and not constantly change according to manufacturer’s whims and status sizing.  Since 1972, the sizing has remained the same.