I can understand uniquely shaped clothes (halter tops, etc) but why not pants, skirts, suits, etc?
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Because of the Sears Catalog.
Originally, dress sizes were meant to correspond to ages. A size 8 dress was meant to fit an 8 year old girl. You could purchase the dress or the pattern and make it at home. This would have been in the first part of the 20th century, when you could buy a whole-ass house from the Sears Catalog.
For next several decades, vanity sizing changed how dresses, and thus women’s clothes, were designed, made, and marketed. That is, if a woman is normally a size 12, but you create a ‘size 10’ dress that fits her, she feels flattered and buys the dress.
Around the 1970s, the pattern companies gave up keeping pace with changing sizes, which is why a woman’s dress pattern size is about 4 sizes bigger than her off the rack dress size.
Nowadays the best fashion advice for women is to buy a garment that fits the widest part of whatever it’s supposed to fit (bust, hips, &tc), then tailor the rest.
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