One of the best article's about plus-size clothing I've ever seen!
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/01/magazine/01plussize-t.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all
Earlier this year, the editors of V, a magazine so recherché it can make Vogue seem like Redbook, published an issue featuring large models in expensive body-baring clothes. In one photograph, a woman in a strapless bathing suit, cut to reveal three rolls of flesh, grabs at her platform stilettos. In another, Tara Lynn, a size 16 model, is clad in nothing but a pair of Dior sandals.
Enlarge This Image
Jen Davis for The New York Times
A self-portrait of the photographer.
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Share your thoughts.
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Read All Comments (197) »
Mainstream fashion magazines have always purported to embrace diverse images of the female body, publishing periodic “shape” issues that juxtapose the thin and very thin with the moderately fleshy. But only in the last year or so have notably larger women been released from the fringes, appearing not only in magazines and on television but also in the more rarefied world of the runway, including a Chanel show in St.-Tropez this spring. This shift dates, more or less, to last fall, when Glamour ran a small picture of a 5-foot-11, 180-pound model comfortably exposing her paunch. So unusual was the appearance of belly fat in this context that the magazine received thousands of letters and comments, most of them roaring with support. The model, Lizzie Miller, appeared on the “Today” show and was profiled in The Guardian.
If defenders saw in these photographs a less-restrictive imagining of the female form, detractors perceived further instances of fetishistic extremism. “This is not a positive look at larger women in fashion but a freak show,”one Internet poster wrote of the V shoot. Another pointed out that glorifying the other end of the weight spectrum did nothing to change fashion’s essentially unhealthful message: “We are taunted daily by skeletal fashion models. . . . However, I defy any of you to idolize these women. Nobody wants to be this fat!”
Size is a subject of considerable controversy in fashion, but it is equally so in American life. What is big? What is too big? What is not big enough? The plus-size woman - to use the marketing-sanctioned term - exists in an increasingly populous and contested ghetto. In recent years the fat-acceptance movement, born in the ’60s, has regained momentum online in what is known as the fatosphere, where much time is spent debunking the supposed benefits of dieting and the dangers of obesity. Fat studies has become its own academic discipline. Theorists investigate, for instance, desk size as a mechanism of education’s “hidden curriculum” and will to social control. But in popular culture any affirmation of corpulence feels decidedly ambivalent. In the series “More to Love,” broadcast on Fox last year, 20 women who weighed up to 279 pounds competed for the affections of an overweight single man: heavy women might be worthy of “The Bachelor”-style indignities but were decidedly unworthy of “Bachelor”-looking bachelors. Similarly, “Huge,” a new ABC Family drama about teenagers’ struggling at a weight-loss camp, casts the pressure to be thin as social bullying while suggesting that it really might be better if the campers stopped gorging on their contraband chocolate.
Perhaps nowhere is the cultural confusion surrounding the larger woman more pronounced than in the clothing industry’s efforts to dress her. According to a 2008 survey conducted by Mintel, a market-research firm, the most frequently worn size in America is a 14. Government statistics show that 64 percent of American women are overweight (the average woman weighs 164.7 pounds). More than one-third are obese. Yet plus-size clothing (typically size 14 and above) represents only 18 percent of total revenue in the women’s clothing industry. The correlation between obesity and low income goes some way toward explaining the discrepancy - the recession was particularly hard on this segment of the market, with sales declining 10 percent between 2008 and 2009, a drop twice that of the women’s apparel industry over all - but it doesn’t explain it entirely. That figure has been fairly constant for the past 20 years.
Even as more and more women get larger and larger, what is available to outfit them remains limited. Four months after the spread in V, the April issue of French Elle showed Tara Lynn undressed again - this time seated in a fan-back wicker chair as if she were waiting for a cocktail at a nudist colony. Could she find nothing to wear?
A venture through the fatosphere - sites like Brickhouse, Fatchic.net and Fat Girls Like Nice Clothes Too - turns up dozens of blogs devoted to the frustrations larger women face finding clothes that do more than obscure. As the bloggers Kate Harding and Marianne Kirby explain in their book, “Lessons From the Fat-o-Sphere: Quit Dieting and Declare a Truce With Your Body”: “There is such a relative scarcity of clothes for fat women that finding something in your size, something merely ‘good enough,’ can feel like a major shopping triumph. But we do not believe in settling for ‘good enough.’ We believe in seeking out great.”
“Great,” it turns out, is hard to find. Mintel confirmed as much in a 2009 report on the U.S. plus-size clothing market. “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.”
In recent years, new players have occasionally entered the game, as the designer Elie Tahari did not long ago; but just as many, or more, have exited or cut back. In 2005, H&M stopped selling plus-size clothes in the United States. J. Crew and, more recently, Ann Taylor began selling plus-size clothes exclusively online. Given the fit challenges a plus-size customer faces, the shift to a virtual space where nothing can be tried on can seem alienating to her - a directive to wear a muumuu. She may not particularly like muumuus, and she doesn’t want to be regarded as someone for whom muumuus are a reasonable choice.
The market for plus-size clothes is effectively a Catch-22: women purchase less than they might because what they see on the racks doesn’t appeal to them; manufacturers and retailers cite poor sales figures as evidence of low demand and retrench, failing to provide the supply that might meet changing tastes. But correcting the imbalance isn’t a simple matter of translating a Milan runway look into a larger size. It is not because Miuccia Prada cannot abide women who are a size 18 that she makes no dresses in size 18. Matters of image and fears of brand diminishment may play a role, but the business of making plus-size clothes turns out to be enormously complicated.
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.”
Thin people are more like one another; heavier people are less like one another. With more weight comes more variation. “You’ll have some people who gain weight entirely in their trunk, some people who will gain it in their hips,” Fasanella continued. “As someone getting into plus-size, you can either make clothing that is shapeless and avoid the question altogether or target a segment of the market that, let’s say, favors a woman who gets larger in the hip. You really have to narrow down your customer.” A designer must then find a fit model who represents that type and develop a pattern around her. But even within the subcategories, there are levels of differentiation. “Armholes are an issue,” Fasanella told me, by way of example. “If you have decided to go after the woman who is top-heavy, well, some gain weight in their upper arms and some do not. There are so many variables; you never win. It’s like making computers and then deciding you want to make monitors; a monitor is still a computer product, but it’s a whole new kind of engineering.”
The few elite manufacturers who have spun off into the plus-size world prove that capital and patience are required in equal measure. Marina Rinaldi, a branch of Max Mara, sells three million pieces of plus-size clothing each year in 93 countries. To make these high-end plus-size clothes, Marina Rinaldi employs 50 people in the paper-pattern department alone. Three fit models are in the design studio every day. Because most of the fabric is stretch, its tensile strength must be tested: 80 percent is manipulated mechanically or by hand to measure resilience. Cutting a stretch fabric is more complicated, because it doesn’t rest easily on the table; stitching it requires using a yarn with elasticity. By the time a Marina Rinaldi tunic-length, drawstring cardigan arrives for sale at $395, it can seem almost economical.
As anyone who has tried to outfit herself in an American shopping mall knows, sizing often seems utterly arbitrary. One manufacturer’s size 4 can announce itself as an invitation to a StairMaster; another as an excuse for a soufflé. Still, as Americans have become bigger and bigger (though not necessarily taller), sizing has evolved to accommodate the shift. While researching old production manuals, Fasanella discovered that a postwar 10 was roughly the equivalent of a current size 2. The dimensions specified for it, in 1947, were a 32½-inch bust, a 25-inch waist and a 35-inch hip. This, as Fasanella points out, poses a challenge to the notion of hourglass voluptuousness as the midcentury emblem.
Oddly, the market for larger clothing was energized while the country was in the midst of one of its earliest diet crazes. Weight obsession, by no means a product of the aerobics age, has long been fixed in the American psyche; plus-size clothing actually predates the ’80s by seven decades.
At the turn of the 20th century, a Lithuanian-born dressmaker named Lena Himmelstein Bryant, whose shop in New York became the basis for the Lane Bryant chain, was asked by one of her clients to make a dress she could wear out of the house while pregnant. Bryant quickly reproduced it, creating what is considered the first commercial maternity dress. By 1911, Bryant’s maternity clothes were doing very well, but newspapers were reluctant to run advertisements for them. So Bryant, with her second husband, Albert Malsin, developed a mail-order catalog. When that proved a success, they decided to tackle ready-to-wear for the “stout figured” woman.
To establish just how larger women differed from average women, Malsin, an engineer with experience plotting curves on railroad tracks, devised a malleable yardstick to measure the figures of 4,500 Lane Bryant customers. Bryant compared those measurements with those of some 200,000 women culled from insurance-company records and determined that there were three types of stout women: “all-over stout,” “flat-busted stout” and “full-busted stout.” Bryant proceeded to offer a full line for the “nearly 40 percent of all women who were larger in some or all of their dimensions than the perfect 36 figure.” By 1923, sales for full-figured clothing exceeded sales for maternity wear, and Lane Bryant was bringing in $5 million a year.
As Lane Bryant’s business was growing, one of the best-selling books in the country was a weight-loss instructional called “Diet and Health With Key to the Calories” by Lulu Hunt Peters. A Los Angeles-based medical advice columnist, Peters lost 70 of her 220 pounds by limiting her nutritional intake to a series of 100-calorie food units. She advised the growing number of fat-conscious people to adopt the same tactic.
As the ideal of the elongated flapper took root, women were continually urged to mask their excess. A 1926 textbook on dressmaking cautioned “stout” women to avoid shiny surfaces because they “make the figure appear larger than do dull surfaces.” Ballooning girth was the object of moral opprobrium in popular culture during the first decades of the 20th century, as the historian Peter N. Stearns outlines in his book “Fat History: Bodies and Beauty in the Modern West.” Tracing the genealogy of the phrase “fat slob,” Stearns finds that it appears as early as 1910 in Owen Johnson’s novel of prep-school life, “The Varmint.” Four years later the magazine Living Age said, “Fat is now regarded as an indiscretion and almost a crime.”
If a certain revulsion toward fat has characterized American life for more than 110 years, it is not so surprising that there is more than a little dissembling in selling plus-size clothing. Online and in print catalogs there is often little effort to reflect the realities of the customers’ proportions. Neiman Marcus uses thin models to sell plus-size, as does Woman Within, a retailer devoted solely to this market. At Neiman Marcus, the plus-size department is called “women’s,” and the sizes range from an obfuscating 1x to 3x, as they do elsewhere. Lane Bryant, still a leader in the plus-size field, refers to the category devoted to sizes 28 to 36, handled by its sister-brand, Catherines, as “exclusives.”
All this canny nomenclature seems predicated on the assumption that the larger a woman is, the more shame she experiences when shopping. Yet, as Jim Fogarty, the president and chief executive of Charming Shoppes, which owns Lane Bryant, told me, sales are actually stronger at the higher end of the size range. “With bridge” - here connoting sizes 14 to 18 - “you have that notion of, ‘It’s temporal for me; I’m going back to a 10 or 12.’ This is a woman who might have been a size 8 or 10 earlier in her life, and she doesn’t easily adjust to the idea that she has gotten bigger.” In other words, the larger a woman is, the more likely she is to be settled with her self-image. When buyers looked at what was selling in Saks Fifth Avenue’s plus-size department, says Joseph Boitano, a senior vice president, they were surprised to learn that it was body-conscious clothes.
In April, Lane Bryant broadcast its first television ad for its lingerie line, Cacique. A bosomy, heavy-set model parades around a bedroom dressed first in a bright blue teddy and then a series of bra-and-panty sets. Settling on some lacy underwear in fuchsia, she checks the smartphone on her vanity table and takes note of a calendar reminder that says, “Lunch with Dan.” Who is Dan? Apparently not her accountant - she merely throws on a short black trench coat and walks out the door.
Lane Bryant bought air time during “American Idol” on Fox and hoped for a similar showcase on ABC (which it never got). When Fox requested edits, the company charged that it was the victim of size prejudice. “Yes, these are the same networks that have scantily clad housewives so desperate they seduce every man on the block,” a Lane Bryant press release stated.
One complaint of the fat-acceptance movement is that the media deny the larger woman any semblance of appetite. Dove’s famous “Campaign for Real Beauty,” which shot women of varying shapes and sizes in their underwear, can hardly be said to resound with eroticism. In an essay titled “Fat Heroines in Chick Lit,” the blogger and activist Lara Frater credits the best-selling author Jennifer Weiner’s “Good in Bed” for prompting a series of novels over the past decade, known collectively as “bigger-girl lit,” in which heavy young women make peace with their bodies and enjoy romantic fulfillment. What Frater laments is an absence of characters heavier than merely average-heavy. “Although it is good to see characters who are in the 9-16 range,” she writes, “it would be beneficial to see characters above 16 and maybe even some that are supersized (i.e., way above size 20, or 300 pounds).”
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.
Nine years ago, Torrid, a plus-size clothing chain aimed at teenagers and young women - and one named to counter a thousand misconceptions - began selling band T-shirts and jeans, a look that was mainly street-driven. Slowly, Torrid began to offer more feminine clothes and eventually grew to 155 stores. On its Web site, Torrid shows its leggings and pencil skirts and lace tights on unambiguously large models.
“You have a pretty interesting and self-assured group of young women now in our age group who don’t come with some of the same baggage that was prevalent before,” Chris Daniel, Torrid’s president, told me. “The girl herself isn’t waiting to be accepted. She says, ‘I like that top Kim Kardashian is wearing; I’m going to get it, and I don’t care if I’m a size 18.’ ”
Torrid carries up to size 28, Daniel says, but it is bombarded with requests to go higher. Lycra is hugely popular, he told me. “The number of skinny jeans we sell would astound one. Can we call them skinny? I don’t know. “Skinny” is a bad word. Our girl hates skinny.”
Ginia Bellafante is a television critic for The New York Times. Her most recent article for the magazine was on Jodi Picoult.
Earlier this year, the editors of V, a magazine so recherché it can make Vogue seem like Redbook, published an issue featuring large models in expensive body-baring clothes. In one photograph, a woman in a strapless bathing suit, cut to reveal three rolls of flesh, grabs at her platform stilettos. In another, Tara Lynn, a size 16 model, is clad in nothing but a pair of Dior sandals.
Enlarge This Image
Jen Davis for The New York Times
A self-portrait of the photographer.
Readers' Comments
Share your thoughts.
Post a Comment »
Read All Comments (197) »
Mainstream fashion magazines have always purported to embrace diverse images of the female body, publishing periodic “shape” issues that juxtapose the thin and very thin with the moderately fleshy. But only in the last year or so have notably larger women been released from the fringes, appearing not only in magazines and on television but also in the more rarefied world of the runway, including a Chanel show in St.-Tropez this spring. This shift dates, more or less, to last fall, when Glamour ran a small picture of a 5-foot-11, 180-pound model comfortably exposing her paunch. So unusual was the appearance of belly fat in this context that the magazine received thousands of letters and comments, most of them roaring with support. The model, Lizzie Miller, appeared on the “Today” show and was profiled in The Guardian.
If defenders saw in these photographs a less-restrictive imagining of the female form, detractors perceived further instances of fetishistic extremism. “This is not a positive look at larger women in fashion but a freak show,”one Internet poster wrote of the V shoot. Another pointed out that glorifying the other end of the weight spectrum did nothing to change fashion’s essentially unhealthful message: “We are taunted daily by skeletal fashion models. . . . However, I defy any of you to idolize these women. Nobody wants to be this fat!”
Size is a subject of considerable controversy in fashion, but it is equally so in American life. What is big? What is too big? What is not big enough? The plus-size woman - to use the marketing-sanctioned term - exists in an increasingly populous and contested ghetto. In recent years the fat-acceptance movement, born in the ’60s, has regained momentum online in what is known as the fatosphere, where much time is spent debunking the supposed benefits of dieting and the dangers of obesity. Fat studies has become its own academic discipline. Theorists investigate, for instance, desk size as a mechanism of education’s “hidden curriculum” and will to social control. But in popular culture any affirmation of corpulence feels decidedly ambivalent. In the series “More to Love,” broadcast on Fox last year, 20 women who weighed up to 279 pounds competed for the affections of an overweight single man: heavy women might be worthy of “The Bachelor”-style indignities but were decidedly unworthy of “Bachelor”-looking bachelors. Similarly, “Huge,” a new ABC Family drama about teenagers’ struggling at a weight-loss camp, casts the pressure to be thin as social bullying while suggesting that it really might be better if the campers stopped gorging on their contraband chocolate.
Perhaps nowhere is the cultural confusion surrounding the larger woman more pronounced than in the clothing industry’s efforts to dress her. According to a 2008 survey conducted by Mintel, a market-research firm, the most frequently worn size in America is a 14. Government statistics show that 64 percent of American women are overweight (the average woman weighs 164.7 pounds). More than one-third are obese. Yet plus-size clothing (typically size 14 and above) represents only 18 percent of total revenue in the women’s clothing industry. The correlation between obesity and low income goes some way toward explaining the discrepancy - the recession was particularly hard on this segment of the market, with sales declining 10 percent between 2008 and 2009, a drop twice that of the women’s apparel industry over all - but it doesn’t explain it entirely. That figure has been fairly constant for the past 20 years.
Even as more and more women get larger and larger, what is available to outfit them remains limited. Four months after the spread in V, the April issue of French Elle showed Tara Lynn undressed again - this time seated in a fan-back wicker chair as if she were waiting for a cocktail at a nudist colony. Could she find nothing to wear?
A venture through the fatosphere - sites like Brickhouse, Fatchic.net and Fat Girls Like Nice Clothes Too - turns up dozens of blogs devoted to the frustrations larger women face finding clothes that do more than obscure. As the bloggers Kate Harding and Marianne Kirby explain in their book, “Lessons From the Fat-o-Sphere: Quit Dieting and Declare a Truce With Your Body”: “There is such a relative scarcity of clothes for fat women that finding something in your size, something merely ‘good enough,’ can feel like a major shopping triumph. But we do not believe in settling for ‘good enough.’ We believe in seeking out great.”
“Great,” it turns out, is hard to find. Mintel confirmed as much in a 2009 report on the U.S. plus-size clothing market. “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.”
In recent years, new players have occasionally entered the game, as the designer Elie Tahari did not long ago; but just as many, or more, have exited or cut back. In 2005, H&M stopped selling plus-size clothes in the United States. J. Crew and, more recently, Ann Taylor began selling plus-size clothes exclusively online. Given the fit challenges a plus-size customer faces, the shift to a virtual space where nothing can be tried on can seem alienating to her - a directive to wear a muumuu. She may not particularly like muumuus, and she doesn’t want to be regarded as someone for whom muumuus are a reasonable choice.
The market for plus-size clothes is effectively a Catch-22: women purchase less than they might because what they see on the racks doesn’t appeal to them; manufacturers and retailers cite poor sales figures as evidence of low demand and retrench, failing to provide the supply that might meet changing tastes. But correcting the imbalance isn’t a simple matter of translating a Milan runway look into a larger size. It is not because Miuccia Prada cannot abide women who are a size 18 that she makes no dresses in size 18. Matters of image and fears of brand diminishment may play a role, but the business of making plus-size clothes turns out to be enormously complicated.
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.”
Thin people are more like one another; heavier people are less like one another. With more weight comes more variation. “You’ll have some people who gain weight entirely in their trunk, some people who will gain it in their hips,” Fasanella continued. “As someone getting into plus-size, you can either make clothing that is shapeless and avoid the question altogether or target a segment of the market that, let’s say, favors a woman who gets larger in the hip. You really have to narrow down your customer.” A designer must then find a fit model who represents that type and develop a pattern around her. But even within the subcategories, there are levels of differentiation. “Armholes are an issue,” Fasanella told me, by way of example. “If you have decided to go after the woman who is top-heavy, well, some gain weight in their upper arms and some do not. There are so many variables; you never win. It’s like making computers and then deciding you want to make monitors; a monitor is still a computer product, but it’s a whole new kind of engineering.”
The few elite manufacturers who have spun off into the plus-size world prove that capital and patience are required in equal measure. Marina Rinaldi, a branch of Max Mara, sells three million pieces of plus-size clothing each year in 93 countries. To make these high-end plus-size clothes, Marina Rinaldi employs 50 people in the paper-pattern department alone. Three fit models are in the design studio every day. Because most of the fabric is stretch, its tensile strength must be tested: 80 percent is manipulated mechanically or by hand to measure resilience. Cutting a stretch fabric is more complicated, because it doesn’t rest easily on the table; stitching it requires using a yarn with elasticity. By the time a Marina Rinaldi tunic-length, drawstring cardigan arrives for sale at $395, it can seem almost economical.
As anyone who has tried to outfit herself in an American shopping mall knows, sizing often seems utterly arbitrary. One manufacturer’s size 4 can announce itself as an invitation to a StairMaster; another as an excuse for a soufflé. Still, as Americans have become bigger and bigger (though not necessarily taller), sizing has evolved to accommodate the shift. While researching old production manuals, Fasanella discovered that a postwar 10 was roughly the equivalent of a current size 2. The dimensions specified for it, in 1947, were a 32½-inch bust, a 25-inch waist and a 35-inch hip. This, as Fasanella points out, poses a challenge to the notion of hourglass voluptuousness as the midcentury emblem.
Oddly, the market for larger clothing was energized while the country was in the midst of one of its earliest diet crazes. Weight obsession, by no means a product of the aerobics age, has long been fixed in the American psyche; plus-size clothing actually predates the ’80s by seven decades.
At the turn of the 20th century, a Lithuanian-born dressmaker named Lena Himmelstein Bryant, whose shop in New York became the basis for the Lane Bryant chain, was asked by one of her clients to make a dress she could wear out of the house while pregnant. Bryant quickly reproduced it, creating what is considered the first commercial maternity dress. By 1911, Bryant’s maternity clothes were doing very well, but newspapers were reluctant to run advertisements for them. So Bryant, with her second husband, Albert Malsin, developed a mail-order catalog. When that proved a success, they decided to tackle ready-to-wear for the “stout figured” woman.
To establish just how larger women differed from average women, Malsin, an engineer with experience plotting curves on railroad tracks, devised a malleable yardstick to measure the figures of 4,500 Lane Bryant customers. Bryant compared those measurements with those of some 200,000 women culled from insurance-company records and determined that there were three types of stout women: “all-over stout,” “flat-busted stout” and “full-busted stout.” Bryant proceeded to offer a full line for the “nearly 40 percent of all women who were larger in some or all of their dimensions than the perfect 36 figure.” By 1923, sales for full-figured clothing exceeded sales for maternity wear, and Lane Bryant was bringing in $5 million a year.
As Lane Bryant’s business was growing, one of the best-selling books in the country was a weight-loss instructional called “Diet and Health With Key to the Calories” by Lulu Hunt Peters. A Los Angeles-based medical advice columnist, Peters lost 70 of her 220 pounds by limiting her nutritional intake to a series of 100-calorie food units. She advised the growing number of fat-conscious people to adopt the same tactic.
As the ideal of the elongated flapper took root, women were continually urged to mask their excess. A 1926 textbook on dressmaking cautioned “stout” women to avoid shiny surfaces because they “make the figure appear larger than do dull surfaces.” Ballooning girth was the object of moral opprobrium in popular culture during the first decades of the 20th century, as the historian Peter N. Stearns outlines in his book “Fat History: Bodies and Beauty in the Modern West.” Tracing the genealogy of the phrase “fat slob,” Stearns finds that it appears as early as 1910 in Owen Johnson’s novel of prep-school life, “The Varmint.” Four years later the magazine Living Age said, “Fat is now regarded as an indiscretion and almost a crime.”
If a certain revulsion toward fat has characterized American life for more than 110 years, it is not so surprising that there is more than a little dissembling in selling plus-size clothing. Online and in print catalogs there is often little effort to reflect the realities of the customers’ proportions. Neiman Marcus uses thin models to sell plus-size, as does Woman Within, a retailer devoted solely to this market. At Neiman Marcus, the plus-size department is called “women’s,” and the sizes range from an obfuscating 1x to 3x, as they do elsewhere. Lane Bryant, still a leader in the plus-size field, refers to the category devoted to sizes 28 to 36, handled by its sister-brand, Catherines, as “exclusives.”
All this canny nomenclature seems predicated on the assumption that the larger a woman is, the more shame she experiences when shopping. Yet, as Jim Fogarty, the president and chief executive of Charming Shoppes, which owns Lane Bryant, told me, sales are actually stronger at the higher end of the size range. “With bridge” - here connoting sizes 14 to 18 - “you have that notion of, ‘It’s temporal for me; I’m going back to a 10 or 12.’ This is a woman who might have been a size 8 or 10 earlier in her life, and she doesn’t easily adjust to the idea that she has gotten bigger.” In other words, the larger a woman is, the more likely she is to be settled with her self-image. When buyers looked at what was selling in Saks Fifth Avenue’s plus-size department, says Joseph Boitano, a senior vice president, they were surprised to learn that it was body-conscious clothes.
In April, Lane Bryant broadcast its first television ad for its lingerie line, Cacique. A bosomy, heavy-set model parades around a bedroom dressed first in a bright blue teddy and then a series of bra-and-panty sets. Settling on some lacy underwear in fuchsia, she checks the smartphone on her vanity table and takes note of a calendar reminder that says, “Lunch with Dan.” Who is Dan? Apparently not her accountant - she merely throws on a short black trench coat and walks out the door.
Lane Bryant bought air time during “American Idol” on Fox and hoped for a similar showcase on ABC (which it never got). When Fox requested edits, the company charged that it was the victim of size prejudice. “Yes, these are the same networks that have scantily clad housewives so desperate they seduce every man on the block,” a Lane Bryant press release stated.
One complaint of the fat-acceptance movement is that the media deny the larger woman any semblance of appetite. Dove’s famous “Campaign for Real Beauty,” which shot women of varying shapes and sizes in their underwear, can hardly be said to resound with eroticism. In an essay titled “Fat Heroines in Chick Lit,” the blogger and activist Lara Frater credits the best-selling author Jennifer Weiner’s “Good in Bed” for prompting a series of novels over the past decade, known collectively as “bigger-girl lit,” in which heavy young women make peace with their bodies and enjoy romantic fulfillment. What Frater laments is an absence of characters heavier than merely average-heavy. “Although it is good to see characters who are in the 9-16 range,” she writes, “it would be beneficial to see characters above 16 and maybe even some that are supersized (i.e., way above size 20, or 300 pounds).”
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.
Nine years ago, Torrid, a plus-size clothing chain aimed at teenagers and young women - and one named to counter a thousand misconceptions - began selling band T-shirts and jeans, a look that was mainly street-driven. Slowly, Torrid began to offer more feminine clothes and eventually grew to 155 stores. On its Web site, Torrid shows its leggings and pencil skirts and lace tights on unambiguously large models.
“You have a pretty interesting and self-assured group of young women now in our age group who don’t come with some of the same baggage that was prevalent before,” Chris Daniel, Torrid’s president, told me. “The girl herself isn’t waiting to be accepted. She says, ‘I like that top Kim Kardashian is wearing; I’m going to get it, and I don’t care if I’m a size 18.’ ”
Torrid carries up to size 28, Daniel says, but it is bombarded with requests to go higher. Lycra is hugely popular, he told me. “The number of skinny jeans we sell would astound one. Can we call them skinny? I don’t know. “Skinny” is a bad word. Our girl hates skinny.”
Ginia Bellafante is a television critic for The New York Times. Her most recent article for the magazine was on Jodi Picoult.