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Like so much in American life history, the classical clothing sizing’s we use today can be followed back to the Civil War.  If that answer sounds glib, it isn’t thought to be.  The Civil War was the pivotal event in American history, marking a transition to the modern era, and hailing varies that stood until the 1940s.  It even changed the mode we buy our clothes.

Antebellum Clothing Size

Prior to the Civilian War, the overwhelming absolute majority of clothing, for men and women, was custom-made or home-made.  There was a limited form of mass made, standardized wear items, mainly jackets, coats, and undergarments, only even these were only produced in limited quantities.  For the almost part, clothing for men was named on an individual ground.  The Civil War modified that.

Mass Producing Uniforms

During the war, the Northern and Southwest armies both taken big quantities of uniforms in a rush.  The Southwest, without a great industrial base, relied primarily on house manufacture for uniforms, and through the war Southern armies typically suffered from a shortage of clothing.  The North modified garment taking chronicle forever.

It rapidly got apparent that the Northern regular armies could not be supplied with uniforms applying traditional modes of clothing product.  Fortunately, the North had a well got textile industry that could meet the dispute.

When the government began to contract with factories for mass produced uniforms, the material manufacturers rapidly projected that they could not make every uniform for a particular soldier.  The only option was to standardize the soldiers’ uniforms.  They placed tailors to the ground forces, to measure the men, and saw that certain measurements, of arm length, chest size, shoulder width, waist sizing, and inseam length, would appear together with reliable regularity.  Practicing this mass of measurement information, they put together the first size charts for men’s clothing.

Later the War

So why didn’t the fabric companions go back to the older production methods after the Civil War?  The answer lies in profits, as with many things in concern.  Clothing makers saw that the standardized sizes they had introduced significantly reduced the manufacture cost of men’s clothing; quite than take one item for one man, they could make one sized of an item, men’s jackets for example, for a grouping of men.  Suddenly, wear was easier to make, mass production became the staple of discount men’s wear, and the clothing industry would never be the like over again.