LA Times: Plus-Sized Women Don’t Care About Fashion
We’ve said it once (well, we’ve said it a million times), and we’ll say it again: fashion houses design with only one size in mind. And that size is thin and of average height. A piece in tomorrow’s LA Times lays out a new list of excuses for why designers don’t make clothes for plus-sized women. And it’s every bit as infuriating as you would expect.
1. Plus-sized clothing can’t just be scaled up from smaller sized pieces because plus-sized women have differently proportioned bodies.
Pattern makers can more easily enlarge or shrink proportions for sizes 0 to 10 because the body’s proportions expand in a more universal manner in the lower sizes.
“The human form is nothing but a bunch of curves,” [chairwoman of fashion design at the Otis College of Art and Design Rosemary] Brantley said. “Those curves get very exaggerated as one gets bigger. The more exaggerated the curve, the more seaming, the more shaping, more darting, more fitting and more expense.”
2. So designers just need to tweak their designs, right? Wrong. Most don’t know how to design for women with different proportions.
Indeed, designers adept at making regular sizes often are not trained in techniques to maintain the correct fit and proportion of plus-size clothes.
3. Not only do they not know how, they don’t care to learn.
Brantley and other fashion academics say design students have no interest in plus-size design, and as a result, few schools offer extensive courses in the specialty. To fit the multiple body proportions, retailers that cater to larger sizes often resort to carrying boxy, shapeless styles that accommodate a variety of body types.
4. But what if they did want to learn? Pshhh, it’s a huge hassle to teach students how to design plus-sized clothes.
The design process also requires larger mannequins and fit models on which to fine-tune samples, a significant investment of time and money for manufacturers or fashion schools.
5. Plus-sized women don’t want to wear cool clothes.
Though plus-size women say they want to buy stylish plus-size clothes, they aren’t big spenders. That’s understandable, Cohen said, because after years of being ignored or offered uninteresting or ill-fitting clothes, they’ve lost interest in fashion. Further, the biggest group of plus-size shoppers is older than 55, and many are low-income.
6. Stores don’t really give a crap either.
Not every retailer has the floor space, expertise or capital to invest in a specialty business that returns 17% of sales. To appropriately serve larger and plus-size customers, mainstream retailers need to invest in larger mannequins, training for sales staff and often, a skilled alterations department, features that have made specialists such as Lane Bryant successful. But extra service isn’t likely at the kinds of stores that sell most plus-size clothing, discounters such as Wal-Mart and Kmart.
And now, let’s all mutter a collective WTF.
[via LA Times]
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