The breakdown of sizing

An article from Colorado's Gazette on Sunday makes the point that modern sizes are around half what they were 50 years ago. Marilyn Monroe is always being held up today as an inspiration for curvy women of today as a size 16, as a mark of a bygone age in which women's roundness was considered sexy. Yet according to this article, and to many other sources too, the 1950s size 16 is today's size 6-8. Which makes Marilyn pretty skinny. We have got much bigger - curves clearly weren't what they are today back in the 50s.

The article also raises the point that women are now so aware of vanity sizing and the differences between the same size between brands that they no longer expect to be any one size. The average woman may, I would guess, have clothes spanning two or three sizes in regular circulation in her wardrobe (my own wardrobe ranges from 10 at the smaller end to 14 at the larger end), plus even bigger and smaller clothes put away which she plans to wear when she gets thin, or becomes pregnant (no comment...). And I think it's fair to say we do enjoy the fact we can fit into different sizes depending on where we shop.

When sizes have become so utterly meaningless, it makes me wonder for how long we will even attempt to classify ourselves as any one size. Could shops start selling clothes as 'size 10-14' or by actual inch/cm measurements (as is suggested to standardise sizing in a current European proposal)?

I don't think women will like knowing -let alone comparing - what exactly they measure in inches, or, on the other hand, the vagueness of being a '10-14'. It seems to suit us much better psychologically to fed our vanity by saying we are the lowest size we can get into - a 10-12 for instance - and buying some garments of that size and others a size larger.