Clothing history researcher weighing in here. Because this isn't completely wrong, but it's also not completely right
I want to first emphasize that I am NOT saying that clothing systems of the past that resulted in most people having custom fit clothing didn't rely on unfair labor practices. Because they absolutely did, from enslaved clothing producers at some times and places to dressmakers and tailors either being underpaid and overwork themselves OR relying on the underpaid labor of pieceworkers doing the actual physical sewing, often for a very long hours with inadequate lighting that destroyed their eyesight. That is 100% a real thing that really happened in these times and I would never try to erase it
The reason everyone had custom-made clothing for large spans of western European and colonial and post colonial North American history from the 17th to the early 20th centuries, which is what people are usually talking about when they say things like this, was because there was an industry around professionals doing that work
Dressmaking was a job. Tailoring was a job. Both of these things were often, though not always, different from being a seamstress or another person who did the physical act of sewing but notably not the custom cutting and fitting. That physical sewing was where you often tended to get the worst labor practices, though again not always, and where housewives frequently came into play. Some dressmakers and tailors catering to middle and working class clientele- because they had to have clothing too -offered services whereby they would cut out and fit the garments, and then someone in the household (usually the women, unsurprisingly) would it sew them together. Most housewives did not know how to make fitted clothing for adults at that time- you do see the rise of home tailoring and dressmaking to some degree around the turn of the 20th century, but that's also around the time you start to see ready-made clothing becoming more and more available. So even then, there wasn't really a shift to a model where most clothing was being made at home for all steps of the process
To the best of my knowledge, barring individual exceptions i.e. "well, my grandmother made all of their clothing!", there has never been a time within that span of years and those geographical areas where the majority of housewives were making custom fitted adult clothing from start to finish
Why does this difference matter? I think because the fundamental notion that the only way everyone can have custom-made clothing is to rely on unfair and/or coerced labor practices is flawed. Because, as with any industry, it could have been made more fair to the workers! People could have been paid better and had more rights! The unfairness was not a function of the custom cutting and fitting, any more than unfair labor practices in, say, a lightbulb factory are a function of the existence of electric light. Yeah, you could say that that wouldn't happen without the demand for electric light, but it doesn't mean electricity is inherently bad
Also, what I tend to see when talking about this kind of thing online is less "romanticizing" and more "historians answering the question everyone is asking, of why our clothing doesn't fit right anymore." to which the answer is indeed "standardized sizing"was it a perfect system? Absolutely not. Like I said at the beginning, it very much relied on unfair labor practices the way we still do today
But it's important to understand what it was and wasn't, HOW those unfair labor practices came into play, and to acknowledge that yes, that shift in how our clothing is made did lead to some of the problems we now have with it
(also, I feel like there's a fascinating conversation to be had about the politics of home clothing production especially in that changeover period a custom-made model to a ready-made model. Because many home dressmaking guides from the late 19th/early 20th century frame it as a sort of liberation from the necessity of consulting a dressmaker rather than an additional workload- but of course, those were aimed at urban and suburban women of the middle class. Women who could have the time to make their own clothing because they were outsourcing some, though probably not all, other domestic tasks to at least one servant. So, while there definitely were times and places throughout history when making clothing was a tiresome part of household obligations, there were also much more recent times when it was something you required a degree of, at minimum, free-time-related privilege to actually do)
(also also, I'm not going to lie, coming at this with the energy of "you should not want clothing to fit better because sometimes in the past, when clothing did fit better, there were unfair labor systems in play" is very strange to me. Like those two things are not inherently, inexorably linked)
