11 July

To go back to tailoring, another interesting thing is that all clothes were originally tailored clothes. If you couldn’t afford a tailor (though they weren’t the luxury once they are now), clothes were made at home, fitted to you. Ready-to-wear clothes off the rack were a creation of the industrialisation of clothes-making. A really fascinating twist is how they decided on standard sizes, given up until that point clothes had been tailor-made for each person. The industry had loads of data from the US military, about the sizes of its troops, so it used that to standardise clothes sizes. It meant millions ended up in clothes that never really fit them properly.