to think Marilyn Monroe probably WAS a size 16 after all?

[MsWetherwax]

I have spent the last 2 days clearing out DM's attic, and found loads of old clothes up there (the house has been in the family a long time and has a large attic) including my great aunts wedding dress. She got married in 1960.

My dgm often referred to this aunt as being quite stout, and her wedding dress was a 16. I tried it on, as you do. I am a size 12, bmi of 25, 5'6". It was too small. By quite a margin. :( I am nearly 40, and have been aware that vanity sizing was on the generous side, but this has really shocked me.

Having spent the rest of the evening "investigating" this by trying on more motheaten vintage clothing we discovered a size 10 in 1960 was about a size 6 now. (Dsis is a 10 and needed at least 3 more inches around the waist, although the wedding dress fitted beautifully) and that it wasn't just the wedding dress that didn't fit me, there were 3 more dresses in there, all size 16, and all too small. :(

I'm admitting to being 60 which means I was a mini-skirted teenager. We were nearly all skinnier back then. My DD is 39 years younger than me and has much chunkier legs and hips than I had. I've noticed she has started wearing longer skirts since she saw a photo of me in 1970 with a very short skirt and 'Twiggy' legs.
I always considered I had a big waist at 26". Bust was 32" and hips were 34". I'm now a size 12 but my hips are the same.

It was partly diet but not in the way you'd expect - we didn't have fast foods but ate lots of carbs and had to eat the fat on meat. I have my mother's cook book which is the same age as me. There is a picture in it of some bacon. It's nearly all fat!
Our parents were still influenced by wartime rationing so nothing was wasted and everything was home cooked. Very few sugary snacks other than home-made cakes. We got 6d (2.5 p) a week in the 50s for sweets and that bought a bag full to last us. A Mars Bar was 6d.

It was partly genetics/ parental diet. My mother was slim and had been hungry for a lot of her childhood, followed by wartime rations and she was fairly typical in build for her generation.

There were also foundation garments and she would wear a corset even though she didn't need one. Her bra was like armour plating!
Teens like me loved those elasticated belts that nipped in your waist and you could roll up the top of a school skirt under the belt to make the skirt shorter.

It was partly excercise. We walked a mile each way to primary school, and came home for lunch so we walked 4 miles a day without thinking twice about it - and that assumes we ever walked in a straight line! We were up and down walls and trees. At secondary school we cycled or walked there. Even in the late 60s I would walk two miles to school. By then I was having school dinners - meat, potatoes and 2 veg, steamed pud and custard. Yet we stayed stick thin.

We also had our school milk, National Health orange juice and cod liver oil!

I think a lot of people are still very skinny now.A lot of people I know are.They do however live a lifestyle like unitarian describes and walk lots and have an active life,and eat what they want and just burn it off.

MM was a size 4-6 UK (size 0 - 2 US) most of the time. A size 8 at her biggest going from her actual measurements.

One of the reasons we may have come up with this sie 16 idea is US to UK size conversion and vanity sizing AND the fact that she had huge boobs. In order to fit into off the hanger clothes like blouses, she probably had to wear a size (or two) bigger than she might otherwise have had to, in order to accomodate this. Otherwise she'd have buttons pinging open. This is a problem I've had myself.

Also, in terms of waist size, how long your torso is comes into the equation. It can actually be harder for someone who is 5' 0" to have a smaller waist than someone who is 6' 0" because your hips and ribcage hold your shape; your waist does not have the bone structure to support it. Its not strictly true that the taller you are the bigger your waist is for this reason. MM at 5' 5" or 6 was over the average height for today, so wasn't short.

Finally, going back to the previous point; our diet today in childhood favours more bone growth, not just height or fat. It means that actually our modern day bone structure is bigger - hence why height has increased by several inches - and therefore you would also expect hip and ribcage sizes to have increased; its not necessarily going to appear as a height increase. I'm not convinced that society's increases in BMI and dress size are purely and simply down to being fat.

I am an almost exact size 8 now, anything I pick up from a rail fits me fine but during my teenage years I was almost exactly a ten and my weight is exactly the same.

Sizing is way out now.

I love these threads - they're always such an exercise in stealth boasting (I'm 5'6", weigh 3 stone 4 as I have for the last 20 years, despite having borne 17 children. And annoyingly I now find I have to take a size 4, even though when I was 20, I took a size 12!). Gosh!

I wasn't boasting, just saying that sizes have changed. I'm only 26 so weighing the same as I did as a teenager isn't much to brag about really - I'm sure it won't be the case when I'm in my 50's.

I wasn't boasting either. My hips have stayed the same but I'm seriously considering a corset!

they're always such an exercise in stealth boasting

Why is being HONEST about your measurements stealth boasting? Is it now unacceptable and taboo to tell the truth.

Anyone who thinks that can fuck off.

NO ONE should be ashamed or discouraged for saying what they are. A culture which makes us hide the truth panders to this idea of 'ideal' body shapes and having to conform to a certain range.

We are all different. There is no shame in being a size 4 anymore than a size 18. And the sooner everyone gets this through their thick head, the better.

Apparently she was 8stone 4, but curvy in an hourglass way. Women were smaller then, apparently, with smaller waists.

RedToothBrush - if you can't see that saying that you've stayed the same size despite having had numerous children and being 30 years older is boasting, then I suspect you're the one that's thick

Oh and incidentally I have a size 16 M&S skirt that was my mum's in the days when it was St Michael - 19070s maybe? It's a size 12 if that. Waist to hip ratio definitely higher than now.

How is it boasting? What size/shape you are is not a boast, it's a FACT. I happen to be quite small widthways but it's not a boast, it's just what size I am. It most certainly isn't anything to be boastful about, given that it has required precisely zero effort on my part. And that's not a boast either. How on earth is it possible to boast about genetics/metabolism/pure blind luck? I get that some people want to be thinner and if you lose weight because you've tried really hard, boast away because you did well! But it's the effort in achieving a goal that will make you feel better about yourself/healthier/help you be able to buy nice clothes more easily/whatever your personal goal in losing weight was that is boastworthy, not the actual size a person is.

And quite honestly, I'd have liked to be a bit bigger for quite a lot of my life because it would have made it easier to buy clothes etc and people wouldn't have been so sneery about skinny people to me.

I just can't be doing with body snarking, full stop. I think we would be a much happier society if we were able to just be happy in who we are without people picking at us.

Some of you haven't actually read my posts properly have you? It's very unusual to stay the same size/proportions for 20 odd years after children. That's what I was talking about and I was being slightly tongue in cheek.

Celebrate! You lucky people :)

Its not boasting to be honest. Sorry. Its just not.
If you have to cover that up or pretend thats not true that thats just wrong.

Its as wrong as deliberately being sneery about others. Whether they are fat or thin.

If you put on weight after having children, that actually perfectly acceptable.
But so is NOT putting on weight after having children.

You are what you are. Its that simple. No one should EVER be made to feel guilty for that. No one should have to apologise for it.

Whats so hard to understand about that? And how that has an impact on everyone. Just to be positive and honest rather than have to aspire to be / or pretend to be something else rather than accept the body you live in and live with.

Well I am in my 50's and still wear the same size as when I was a teenager. Size 10. The fact that I was a stone and a half to 2 stone lighter might indicate that vanity sizing is going on. Not stealth boasting, honestly

Audrey Hepburn was a child during the starvation winter in holland during the war and her body never recovered.

I hate the phrase 'vanity sizing'.

As Rapunzel pointed out, average sizes have had to go up otherwise manufacturers would have run out of numbers. And it's not just that people are fatter (though obviously a lot of us are), we are BIGGER. I was whip thin in my 20s (don't worry kiriwawa, I'm two sizes larger now) but at 5'11 with broad shoulders I am bigger than my mum and far bigger than my grandmother .

My DD1 is 3 years old, the size of a 5/6 year old and according to the NHS average height calc will be 6'3 when she is fully grown. If sizes didn't change she'd be a, I dunno, 33 or something. And she's a normal weight for her height. In my generation she'd be insanely tall - for her generation she'll just be tall, like I was.

So is it vanity sizing or just sensible to copy the population? I think saying it's vanity is a kind of sneering that we're not all teeny tiny women anymore.

Perhaps we should celebrate that we're getting stronger and bigger and more athletic* rather than regretting it.

*yes, yes and fatter.

Erm, small point to what you say there Panpiper.

You wouldn't run out of sizes. You'd just use bigger ones.

In fact the converse is true to what you say.

If sizes continue to go in the direction they are we'll run out of sizes at the bottom end.

A few years back you never saw a size 4. They aren't common now, but they also aren't that uncommon either.

It won't be long before a size 4 uk will be a size 0 uk. Then what? Do we get a size -2?!

Agree Redtooth
As i said above back in 70/80s it was very difficult to get what was then a size8.

I am certainly 'bigger' than my mother and grandmother - I am taller and more muscular.

toadspawn - I remember reading an interview with a photographer about twiggy, he'd said that her body shape was sculped by a childhood with rationing, low protien diet, lots of bread and carbs, not a wide variety of fruit and veg throughout the year etc - he was saying later models might be thin, but they have much more substaintal frames. it does seem later generations are larger, not just fat, but frames.

Kiri - for a large percentage of the female population it's not boasting, they have remained the same size throughout adulthood. I know a lot of woman who are wearing things that are 15+ years old.

I never saw a size 8 in the 70's when I was a slip of a girl, so wore size 10 the lowest size. I still wear size 10 now, mainly, but maybe a size 10 in Chelsea girl was very small compared to a size 10 in Richard Shops.

Oh the taller thing is true too - my mum is same height as me, 5' 0 - she was saying you didn't get petite ranges when she was young, but not many things needed altering, now most clothes need to come from petite ranges or be altered, its just that the standard length has changed. She said she never used to get coat sleeves changed, now they always need doing - I think looking at the 'standard' clothes size, most now are catering for longer legs and arms as well as larger arses.