Here is the whole sad story. Naturally, none of the people doing it were women.
” In pre-industrial America, most clothing was crafted at home or by professional tailors or dressmakers from individual measurements taken of each customer. In the early Twentieth Century, the growing urban middle class began to purchase the affordable and fashionable ready-to-wear merchandise which new technology and industrialized production methods had created the means to manufacture.
At the request of the Mail Order Association of America (MOAA), between 1949–1952 the National Bureau of Standards (NBS, now NIST) conducted a comprehensive study of women’s body measurements to develop a sizing standard for women’s ready-to-wear clothing. Mansfield Lonie of the NBS Commodity Standards Division was appointed Acting-Secretary of the Sub-Committee on Body Measurements for Wearing Apparel Sizes and Measurements of the MOAA Committee on Standards and Terminology. Churchill Eisenhart and Lola Deming, mathematicians in the NBS Statistical Engineering Laboratory, lent their expertise to the project. ”