Style Theory: Exposing the WORST Scam in Clothing History!

Take a look at these three pairs of jeans. On  the tags they all say that they're the same size. But when I hold up a measuring tape, they  say something different. What in the Sisterhood of Traveling Pants is going on here? Well it  turns out that pants are a lot like icebergs. You actually have no idea how big they really are. But how did it get this way and how do we change it? That is a journey you will not believe. It  is a crazy ride that led us to the sizing system that we have today. And

the cruel reality  is, history is about to repeat itself. Hello Internet. Welcome to Style Theory,  the one size fits all channel for anyone looking to solve the mysteries of fashion. Now, as a guy, I always knew that women's sizing worked a lot differently than men’s.  Guy sizing typically goes from boys to men. Insert nineties album cover here. With a few of  us venturing out into the taller or plus sizes. And the idea is pretty darn simple. You get  your waist measurement, you get your insea

m measurement, and you're good to go. Women, on the other hand, oh, jeez. You got yourself girls, juniors,  women's tall, petite, plus, size zero, size double zero. What is going on here? Who needs  this many categories? And it doesn't even stop there. When I told the women of team theorist that  I wanted to talk about sizing. Well, first off, they just laughed in my face. But the second  reaction was to tell war stories about shopping for pants, trying on pair after pair and store  after store

because they never knew what size was going to be accurate to their body or even what  accurate meant across various establishments. Sometimes even within the same store, they  were needing to buy different sizes. Like, say you're jeans shopping for someone with a 29 inch  waist at a department store, that means you're looking at a size 8 from Ralph Lauren, a size  10 from Tommy Hilfiger, a size 6 from NYDJ which is not your daughter's jeans, that's a new one  that I learned, or a size 32 from T

rue Religion. Out of that list, I would like to call  your attention to two key factors. One, none of those numbers are the same, even though  we're still talking about the same size. And two, none of them are 29! Not one of them are the  actual number of the measurement that we took. And that's not even touching on this massive  gap of what counts as a small, medium or large. You can be an extra small in one brand and a  medium in another. Why? What is going on? Can we come back from the shoppi

ng nightmare to  some kind of civilized sizing system? Well, it turns out that the problem of clothing  sizes is one of those iceberg issues. We see the tiny bit at the top, which is all the weird  mismatch sizes that are happening at the stores. But under the surface there is a lot more  to see, from government agencies to wartime rationing. Yeah, really. So hold on to your  pants, friend. We're heading under the surface to see just how big the iceberg gets. First,  let's just get one thing str

aight. When it comes to standardization of sizing in the women's  clothing section, the standard is nonexistent. There is nothing there at all. Retailers  don't have to answer to anyone when it comes to setting up their sizing. So in general,  you find two major systems at work here: Alpha sizes, that uses small, medium and large.  And numerical sizing, which uses even numbers for women’s and odd numbers for juniors.  And let me just stop right there again. Why does women's fashion have this ext

ra category?  Nowadays, junior sizes are considered to be for, quote, “developing bodies” with styles that cater  to shorter torsos, smaller busts and slimmer hips. Now, that might not be the target audience for  that sort of branding, but I can say it feels… confusing that it gets its own category when  men's clothing just works that into the standards. Well, it turns out that juniors wasn't originally  intended to be that at all. In fact, it functioned closer to a petite or smaller sizing. Jun

ior  or junior miss as it was called back in the day, it was made to be an alternative for more  petite women. That's it. It was just smaller sizes. Which honestly explains why I always  find Steph shopping in the junior section. They offer a better fit for someone small and  they're actually cheaper to boot. But even then, she's still taking at least five pairs of the  same pants to the dressing room to try and find the pair that fits her. So what is the  problem in this? Welcome to the next le

vel of this iceberg, the wild world of vanity sizing. And if that sounds like I'm calling shoppers vain, let me get one thing straight. I'm not. But  you know who is? The big corporations behind all your favorite clothing brands. When it comes  to shopping, people aren't just shopping with an eye out for the best bargain. They're looking  to feel good in their clothes. And brands have taken that idea and ran with it to an extreme. How? Well, vanity sizing is basically size inflation or I guess s

ize deflation. Where  someone with a bust of 32 inches would wear a size 14 in the 1930s, a six in the  1960s. And in 2011, that same person would now be buying a size zero. Yup, you heard  me. Zero. As in the number that means literally nothing. Yep. Makes a whole lot of sense. The most famous example of this in history is Marilyn Monroe, who was considered to be a size  12 back in the 1960s and would now be considered a size 4 to 6 in 2023. Brands basically  learned that if they marketed their

sizes to appeal to the shoppers, quote, “desired  size” rather than a specific measurement, and they were able to sell more items and that  shopper was more likely to come back and buy more. And again, without any sort of agreed  upon standardization in the industry, those desired sizes will vary from store to  store. What that means is that the waistband of a pair of size six women's jeans can vary as  much as six inches from one brand to the next. It is an insane level of variability. I'm not

a fan  of these big corporations using our self-image against us in the name of making more money. So how did we possibly get to this market of no accountability? Well, it turns out that there  did indeed used to be someone holding the reins to this crazy sizing circus, the government. And  we all know how great it is when the government sets up rules around women's bodies. People  really love that one. That's right. In 1949, Uncle Sam whipped out his measuring tape to help  you find the perfec

t fit for your new pair of jeans in response to one unusual problem, there  were too many returns. Back in the days before Amazon and free returns people were still shopping  from the comfort of their own homes. But instead of scrolling on their phones, they were flipping  through the pages of catalogs. Ah, a catalog was just a big old book, basically a printed version  of your IG feed, complete with just as many ads. The more things change, the more they stay the  same, am I right? It seems nor

mal for us now, but back then it was the new frontier for  fashion. In this new world of at home shopping, companies were starting to feel the pain in their  wallet. With people no longer needing to go to stores to try things on, they were faced with this  brand new task of trying to understand what size to buy for themselves without seeing it or trying  it on. And they were getting the answer wrong a lot. Companies couldn't keep up with all the money  they were losing from the returns. To fix t

his, the Mail Order Association of America partnered  with the National Bureau of Standards in 1949 to standardize sizing for both men and  women to help reduce returns. And in 1958, nearly ten years later, they finally came  up with an answer: the commercial standard, a collection of clothing sizes made to cover  the widest range of people possible without them needing to alter their clothing at home. And that's an important point, because regardless of what size you bought, most women were sti

ll  expected to know how to sew and alter their clothes. And the commercial standard did help at  first by reducing returns. But then sizes began to change. Times began to change and clothing needed  to change along with them. And they did try, releasing an update in the 1970s to try  and keep up with the demand for change. But it just didn't last. Now, up to this  point, we've been focused on the way that we've tried to fix the sizing problem in  women's clothing, but it all had to have started

somewhere right? Theorists, I feel like  we're so close to the bottom of this thing, to where the size discrepancy for women all  first started. But before we can get there, it's time for me to follow the commercial standard of  YouTube and ask you to hit that subscribe button. You see, we are currently marching our way  to that 2 million subscriber milestone, and to do that, we're going to need your help. In  exchange, you'll get a new, exciting episode in your sub box every week. If you think

the  conspiracy behind women's sizes is crazy, wait until you find out the conspiracy behind your  soap. Soap, that's not going to get you clean. Also last week, we figured out how Barbie's mile  high heels might actually be given her superhuman ankle strength. All of that more just from one  click of the button. It's free, it's easy, and you'll learn a lot along the way. And now let's  get back to the deep, dark bottom of the clothing iceberg mystery. So you might be wondering, how  did men ge

t through all of this mostly unscathed? Well, they actually had one thing working in  their favor: War. Yeah. As bleak as it sounds, it's actually true. As far back as the 1800s,  global war efforts meant that militaries needed clothing to outfit their soldiers  and they needed it fast. Up until then, people mainly relied on tailors and their wives  to help mend and alter their clothing to fit. However, those methods didn't translate to  the high production rates that were needed by the military

. And so the first ever ready to  wear outfit was made, not to walk the runway, but to walk the battlefield. And it  was made using only one measurement: chest size. While this was certainly a very  barebones means of sizing. The idea of affordable, ready to wear clothing eventually made its way  to the fashion industry, at least for the men. Women were still stuck, spending the big bucks on  tailors, stabbing their fingers with needles at home sewing to get themselves the perfect fit.  And that

, theorists, now leads us to the final layer of this iceberg, to the shadowy figure of  women's sizing standards that led us to where we are today, one woman behind it all: Ruth O'Brien.  O'Brien was the head of textile and clothing at the U.S. Bureau of Home Economics in 1939, known  today as the U.S. Department of Agriculture. And it was her personal mission to fix  sizing for women and children. You see Ruth, aspiring Glinda that she was, saw men  getting standardized sizing and thought: Yeah

, why not take that idea and bring it to the  women's department? Sounds great, right? Finally, someone is here to help fix the problem. Back at  the time before Ruth got her hands onto things, sizing was based on age for young girls and  bust size for women. Meaning that every 15 year old was supposed to fit a size “15” and every  woman was expected to have the same hourglass shape proportional to their bust measurements. Ahhhh not great. Obviously it was a system that was operating off of some

unfair body assumptions.  So Ruth comes in with a plan to fix it all, right? Well it turns out that while Ruth's ideas  were great, the execution left something to be desired. The study started off strong. It took  55 unique measurements from each of its 15,000 participants from the slope of their shoulders to  the, quote, “girth of the abdominal extension.” But the devil is really in the details. While  the sampling size certainly seemed large, when you're talking about finding a universal  st

andard, 15,000 people, it’s a very small sample size considering the U.S. population in 1939  was about 130 million. But that was actually the least of their problems. The more we look into the  study, the more we see cracks in its foundation. Due to older women's reluctance to participate  in a study like this, O'Brien's data skewed younger. This meant that, on average, sizes  would lean towards more youthful body types, much like we talked about with the junior sizing  earlier. Likewise, the s

tudy also leaned toward women from families making less than $2,000  annually. However, there was one major red flag that has to be addressed: Race. Oh, the yikes  on this one keep coming. According to the study, quote, “when it was found necessary, for the sake  of good feeling within a group, to measure a few women of other than the Caucasian race, this fact  was entered under remarks and the schedule later discarded.” So basically they threw away a huge  chunk of data from anyone who wasn't C

aucasian. And if that wasn't bad enough, the hits just keep  on coming. Ruth also wrote off an additional third of the data for, I quote, “gross errors”, where  the supervisor of the measurement basically threw out any numbers that they didn't  believe, any numbers that they were like, Oh, human body couldn't look like that.  And they were just scrapped entirely. An entire third of the data was lost for  all of those reasons. So really might be skewing the data a bit as far as what the  average

size of an American woman looks like, huh? So what then did she propose off of all  this thoughtfully collected data? Glad you asked there friends, because she recommended that  manufacturers use her data to create roughly 27 different sizes of dresses for consumers. Does that number sound familiar? Because it should. Looking at her modern sizing, you see that  the same idea is still in practice to this very day. And that right there, that is the cherry  on top of this depression sundae. Because

the commercial standard, you know, that thing that  we talked about earlier that tried to solve the sizing problem but ended up making it worse and  paving the way for the size inflation we have today. Yeah, that thing. It drew a huge portion  of its data from Ruth. Problems and all. So the entire foundation of how we think about women's  sizing today is based on one woman's highly inaccurate, highly biased, non-inclusive dataset  of what the American woman should look like. That, my friends, i

s the conspiracy behind women's  clothing sizes. But I can't just leave the episode there, because if there's one thing that  you should take away from all of this is that there is still hope for some kind of a universal  or at least an easier sizing system in the future. Remember how I said that the commercial standard  came about because companies were feeling the hurt when it came to returns and lost sales. Well, now  in the age of online shopping and easier returns, you're seeing the exact s

ame problem creeping  up again. About 30 to 40% of clothing bought online is actually returned. It is a huge  margin that is killing merchandisers in restocking and reimbursement fees, putting  us once again on the edge of a whole new evolution in how we think about clothing sizes. While the technology is still in its early development stages. Several tech companies  are racing to crack the code of developing AI systems that can accurately measure us  through our phone cameras. We could soon be

saying bye bye to changing rooms all together,  provided we're all comfortable giving Skynet an entire scan of our body. I guess everything  in life is a tradeoff. But hey! That's just a theory. A STYLE THEORY! Keep looking sharp. And if you love conspiracies, you'll love our episode about what made women's pockets  so ridiculously small. That one is the box on the right. Or if you want to learn what's  actually going on inside of those jeans once you managed to buy them, click the box on the  l

eft to find out what is growing on your legs, because spoiler alert, your soap is failing you. Welcome to Style Theory my friends, making you question all your life decisions.  As always, I will see you next week.