Absurdity of women’s clothing: A US size 8 dress today is the same as a 1958 size 16

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"Mad Men" era dresses from the late 1950s are so different to the same sizes today that a 1958 size 8 is now smaller than a modern double-zero. Photo: Handout

Published: 9:45am, 12 Aug 2015Updated: 11:26am, 12 Aug 2015

Here are some numbers that illustrate the insanity of women’s clothing sizes: A US size 8 dress today is nearly the equivalent of a size 16 dress in 1958.

And a size 8 dress of 1958 doesn’t even have a modern-day equivalent - the waist and bust measurements of a Mad Men-era 8 are smaller than today’s size 00.

These measurements come from official sizing standards once maintained by the National Bureau of Standards (now the National Institute of Standards and Technology), and taken over in recent years by the American Society of Testing and Materials. Data visualiser Max Galka recently unearthed them for his Metrocosm blog last week, in a posting on America’s obesity epidemic.

Centres for Disease Control and Prevention data show that the average American woman today weighs about as much as the average 1960s man. And while the weight story is pretty straightforward - Americans got heavier - the story behind the dress sizes is a little more complicated, as any woman who’s ever shopped for clothes could probably tell you.

Graphs created by Max Galka for his Metrocosm blog ( http://metrocosm.com/crazy-american-obesity-in-three-graphics/ ) show the transformation of women's dress sizing in the US since the 1950s. Source: Metrocosm/Max Galka

Today’s women’s clothing sizes have their roots in a depression-era US government project to define the Average American Woman by sending a pair of statisticians to survey and measure nearly 15,000 women. They “hoped to determine whether any proportional relationships existed among measurements that could be broadly applied to create a simple, standardized system of sizing,” Julia Felsenthal wrote on Slate.

Sadly, they failed. Not surprisingly, women’s bodies defied standardisation. The project did yield one lasting contribution to women’s clothing: the statisticians were the first to propose the notion of arbitrary numerical sizes that weren’t based on any specific measurement - similar to shoe sizes.