Eli5 why are there so many different systems for clothes sizes in the world (S,M,L vs 36,38,40 vs 0,1,2 and so on)?
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Just like any other system, they all developed independently since before the world was such a global place. The reason you notice it is because of globalisation.
Because people in the US don’t care how well their clothes would fit someone in Myanmar, just like people in Myanmar don’t care how well their clothes fit someone in Belgium. We all want a system that works for us.
S,M,L, and so on don’t work between demographics. The average height varies greatly between countries. It doesn’t make sense for the Netherlands to only dress in XL and larger because they’re tall. They want S for smaller people, and L for larger people.
The numbers would work (EU mostly uses Length/Waist for pants), but the US’ insistence on using the imperial system still makes it pretty impossible to have that make sense for everyone.
Create a unified clothing size system, in order to replace all the old systems.
You end up with [this.](https://xkcd.com/927/)
The numbers you used in the question, normally refer to inches. That’s normal for dude sizes, especially in the UK and probably other places aswell.
S M L would usually be saying ‘Well, it will fit someone who is within this range’. Might be a little too big/small for some folk, but for some clothes it doesn’t make too much of a difference (Like t-shirts for example)
Now the challenge comes with different TYPES of clothing. a 36in chest might be a small. But so is a 28in waist.
So you can’t really say ’36in clothes are Small’, as a 36in waist for trousers would likely be Large.
The SML thing came during/after the war. Up until then, most nice clothes were custom fitted, but to produce the large amount of uniforms something needed to be standardised, and even more so when white-collar jobs became a thing – People needed a bunch of shirts for work, but paying for a bespoke tailor would have been way too much.
Each manufacturer will have their own ‘range’ for SML – Hence why some brands a medium will fit you fine, and in others they would be too tight.
Womens clothes sizing is a WHOLE other kettle. Women tend to have very different shapes to men, Particularly around the chest and butt, however these measurements can’t accurately correlate the persons size. Boobs and butts come in all sorts of different sizes, even on women with the same size waist and height.
So, Measurements were taken from a bunch of women to try and get the averages. The challenge here was that all the women measured tended to be from the same demographic – Low income white women – So generally all had hourglass figures (Because of how the world was at the time with regards to diets and stuff)
The original idea was that, like childrens sizes, it was based on the age of the woman (So a size 12 would fit a 12yr old and a 16 would fit a 16yr old). However, theres an immediate issue with that. Between 12 and 16 is puberty, and thats when the parts mentioned above start to grow. Dudes are easy, and they are generally straight up and down along the torso, and any belly is solved with a longer shirt.
On the early ’80s the whole sizing this was completely revised to try and standardise it, But a business is gonna business, so along comes ‘vanity sizing’. If a woman walks into a clothes store and sees that she can fit into a 10 when in other stores she is a 12, the little ego boost may encourage a sale. Shopping for clothes is an emotional thing – You want something that looks good on you and fits you well, and with a culture that is (or purported to be) biased towards thin/skinny/lean bodies the size tag can mean the difference between a sale and a no-sale.
This is also clear when it comes to functional clothing. For the most part, You don’t care what it looks like. You are only wearing that jacket or trousers for work. Everyone else is aswell, so theres no need to look nice, plus you are more wanting it to last a long time (as it’s being worn and washed more often than your everyday clothes) and in some cases it gets mucky so that your clothes don’t.
So for womens sizes, It’s largely arbitrary because of the above, but can be used as a general guide. S = 8, M = 10, L = 12, XL = 14.
That is not to say that a woman who is size 12 or 14 is a Large woman – In fact, probably the opposite – times change and so do peoples bodies and this also plays into the vanity side – It feels better to be looking for a Size 12 than asking ‘Do you have this in a Large?’
The measurement change in the early 80’s has also contributed to some online discrepancies. Marilyn Monroe was a Size 8 – But that was in the old system. In the new one she’d be a size 12.
SML can’t really work between male and female bodies, as men tend to be taller and broader than women, so a Mens medium might equate to Large or XL on a an equivalently sized woman.
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