School uniform

sizes have apparently increased - to accommodate the expanding waistlines of students.
Ms W informed me of this in an email yesterday. She is currently in Italy with her father and enjoying every moment of it if her messages to me are to be believed. But yesterday's email was also a reminder that she will be back at school at the beginning of February.
       "I need new school shoes and new sports shorts only the size that is long enough is probably too wide."
Ms W is of average height. Ms W is not fat. If anything she is on the "skinny" side. Her father is not fat either. Both of them have problems finding clothes that fit. 
Fifty years ago they would both have been considered "average". Commercially made clothes would have fitted without too much trouble.   
My mother and my grandmothers made most of their own clothes, my clothes and the clothes of my siblings and my cousins. I also inherited clothes from other children. The winter coats I wore were passed on to my mother for me from a woman who had three girls. Her first two girls, older than I was, wore them first. Then I wore it for a winter before it was passed back to her for her third girl. Then it was passed back to my mother for Middle Cat and then the Black Cat. My brother's winter coats were made from cloth that my grandfather had available in his tailoring business and did a similar amount of duty with another family of boys.
My box pleated school tunics - for those of you old enough to remember those  horrendous garments - lasted for years. I never seemed to grow fatter or much taller. They were passed on to another child and then back to my mother for Middle Cat and then the Black Cat before another child wore them.
The thing about all this was not just the quality of the cloth and the care taken of the garment but the curious fact that none of us were fat. The garments might be "taken up" or "let down" but they fitted us at least after a fashion. 
I don't think it would be as easy to do that now. There are many more children who are considered to be "obese". Others who are now "average" would have been considered to be verging on "fat" when I was a child. 
Before I started school I remember standing in the local haberdashery store not far from my paternal grandmother's home while she and my mother looked at patterns to see what was being made. (My mother drafted any patterns herself after that using the "Enid Gilchrist" books and adapting them.) There were patterns for "chubby" children. I wanted to know what the word meant and my mother saying, "Fat. You aren't fat. You're thin which is how you should be."
I wish the same was true now. I'd still fit into an "average" uniform.