What size clothes does the average woman wear?

In the UK and throughout much of Europe and Australasia the average height varies from 5' to 5'3. The old clothes sizes tended to correspond to the UK's 1951 size survey, which took 5'2" as average height, and also took a slim, hour glass figure as standard, which made sense in a rationing-era post war world. In the 1990s the Size UK project examined 16,000 people and came up with different dimensions for average. This was widely reported, but stores responded to the headline (people getting bigger) rather than the facts (height not changing much but many individuals much fatter).