Current Reading, Plus-Size Wars

Ginia Bellafante has written an article long awaited, a well-written and researched review of the “little effort to reflect the realities of the customers’ proportions.” Perhaps manufacturers and advertisers might notice the ever-enlarging numbers of clothes left on the rack at the end of a season, seemingly designed for the tween population rather than the women who could only imagine the clothing on their 13 year olds, rather than themselves. A few paragraphs from the piece:

” ‘There is not a deep range of styles in stores devoted to plus-size,’ David Lockwood, Mintel’s director of research, told me. ‘They’ll pick up on a single trend, it will dominate the floor space and that will be that.’ The plus-size business is often regarded as tertiary, ‘a stepchild,’ Marshal Cohen, chief industry analyst at the NPD Group, a market-research firm, says. ‘Retailers don’t nurture the business, and the investment on the part of retailers is great’ — floor space, potentially bigger dressing rooms, sales associates sensitive to customers’ particular needs — ‘so it leaves few players in the end.’ “

” ‘The most formidable obstacle lies in creating a prototype. If you already have a line of clothing and a set system of sizing, you cannot simply make bigger sizes. You need whole new systems of pattern-making. ‘The proportions of the body change as you gain weight, but for women within a certain range of size, there is a predictability to how much, born out by research dating to the 1560s,’ explained Kathleen Fasanella, who has made patterns for women’s coats and jackets for three decades. ‘We know pretty well what a size 6 woman will look like if she edges up to a 10; her bustline might increase an inch,’ Fasanella said. ‘But if a woman goes from a size 16 to a 20, you just can’t say with any certainty how her dimensions will change.’ “

“Companies that market to young women in their teens and 20s are especially aware of how attitudes are changing. Animal prints, beaded tank tops and strapless dresses mark the collection of Faith 21, which made its debut last year as the plus-size division of Forever 21. Beth Ditto, lead singer of the band Gossip, herself a size 20, also has a line of clothes for young women that does not take inspiration from housecoats. Despite well-publicized fears of a childhood-obesity epidemic, pockets of the culture affirm the overweight teenager’s experience.”

Read the entire article at The New York Times site. And thank you, Ginia.