Like so considerably in American life, the standard clothes sizes we use today can be traced back to the Civil War. If that answer sounds glib, it isnt meant to be. The Civil War was the pivotal event in American history, marking a transition to the contemporary era, and heralding adjustments that stood until the 1940s. I discovered visit link by searching the Internet. It even changed the way we get our clothes. Antebellum Clothing Sizing Prior to the Civil War, the overwhelming majority of clothes, for men and women, was tailor-produced or residence-created. To research more, consider peeping at: read more . There was a restricted assortment of mass made, standardized clothes things, primarily jackets, coats, and undergarments, but even these have been only produced in limited quantities. For the most component, clothes for guys was created on an person basis. The Civil War changed that. Mass Producing Uniforms For the duration of the war, the Northern and Southern armies both needed huge quantities of uniforms in a hurry. The South, with no a massive industrial base, relied mainly on house manufacture for uniforms, and by way of the war Southern armies normally suffered from a shortage of clothing. The North changed garment producing history forever. It swiftly became apparent that the Northern armies could not be supplied with uniforms using standard modes of clothes production. Check This Out contains further concerning why to do this viewpoint. Thankfully, the North had a properly developed textile sector that could meet the challenge. When the government began to contract with factories for mass developed uniforms, the textile producers swiftly realized that they could not make each uniform for a distinct soldier. The only alternative was to standardize the soldiers uniforms. They sent tailors to the armies, to measure the men, and saw that specific measurements, of arm length, chest size, shoulder width, waist size, and inseam length, would appear with each other with reputable regularity. Hit this website worth reading to research when to consider this hypothesis. Making use of this mass of measurement data, they put collectively the first size charts for mens clothing. Soon after the War So why didnt the textile businesses go back to the older production approaches following the Civil War? The answer lies in profits, as with several items in enterprise. Clothing producers saw that the standardized sizes they had introduced drastically decreased the manufacturing expense of mens clothes rather than make 1 item for a single man, they could make one particular size of an item, mens jackets for example, for a group of men. All of a sudden, clothing was easier to make, mass production became the staple of discount mens clothes, and the clothing market would in no way be the exact same again.