Why Are Our Garments Made To Commonplace Sizes?

Like a lot in American life, the standard clothes sizes we use right this moment might be traced back to the Civil War. If that reply sounds glib, it isn’t meant to be. The Civil Conflict was the pivotal event in American history, marking a transition to the fashionable era, and heralding adjustments that stood until the 1940s. It even changed the way in which we buy our clothes.

Antebellum Clothes Sizing

Prior to the Civil Conflict, the overwhelming majority of clothes, for women and men, was tailor-made or home-made. There was a limited variety of mass produced, standardized clothes items, mainly jackets, coats, and undergarments, however even these were only produced in restricted quantities. For essentially the most part, clothes for males was made on an individual basis. The Civil Struggle changed that.

Mass Producing Uniforms

In the course of the war, the Northern and Southern armies both wanted large portions of uniforms in a hurry. The South, with out a large industrial base, relied primarily on home manufacture for uniforms, and thru the struggle Southern armies usually suffered from a shortage of clothing. The North changed garment making history forever.

It rapidly grew to become apparent that the Northern armies could not be provided with uniforms utilizing traditional modes of clothing production. Fortuitously, the North had a effectively developed textile business that could meet the challenge.

When the federal government began to contract with factories for mass produced uniforms, the textile manufacturers rapidly realized that they could not make every uniform for a specific soldier. The only choice was to standardize the soldiers’ uniforms. They despatched tailors to the armies, to measure the men, and noticed that certain measurements, of arm size, chest measurement, shoulder width, waist measurement, and inseam length, would appear together with dependable regularity. Utilizing this mass of measurement data, they put collectively the primary measurement charts for males’s clothing.

After the War

So why didn’t the textile companies go back to the older production strategies after the Civil Battle? The answer lies in income, as with many things in business. Clothing manufacturers noticed that the standardized sizes they’d introduced significantly lowered the manufacturing cost of males’s clothing; relatively than make one item for one man, they might make one size of an item, mens jackets for instance, for a group of men. Out of the blue, clothing was easier to produce, mass production became the staple of low cost men’s clothes, and the clothes trade would by no means be the same again.

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