The fashion industry has always prided itself on being elitist.
In many ways, the industry maintains its status through the portrayal of an unattainable world. This fantasy land is populated by tall, ribby angels who walk effortlessly in stilts. They are ruled by the designers who dress them.
Together they sell the ultimate commodity: glamour — but they won’t sell it to just anyone.
A vast majority of the names we’ve come to worship in fashion — Versace, Gucci, Armani — only make clothes for women size 12 and smaller, despite the fact that the average American woman wears a size 16.
Tim Gunn — fashion critic, former professor at Parson’s the New School for Design and current television personality— is criticizing the fashion industry’s elitist and exclusionary attitudes toward women’s bodies.
In a recent Washington Post article, Gunn wrote that the fashion industry has “turned its back on plus-size women” and calls the move “disgraceful.”
Gunn is certainly no stranger to speaking his mind.
On the hit fashion design show ”Project Runway,” Gunn is famous for delivering harsh truths with a kind hand.
Many of his quotable quips appear on what the show calls the “real woman” challenge, in which viewers become models for a single episode.
Each season, designers shudder at the thought of making garments for a plus-size frame and often blame their failed designs on the bodies of their curvier models.
This attitude is, we believe, an accurate snapshot of how the fashion industry treats non-model body types.
As Chanel head designer and fashion living legend Karl Lagerfeld so delicately put it in 2013, “Nobody wants to see curvy women on the catwalk.”
For decades, the message from the industry has been crystal clear: Fashion is not for plus-size women.
And the problem extends beyond high fashion.
Although some affordable retailers do offer plus size clothing, more often than not, plus size options at popular stores are comprised of baggy muumuu-like clothing with little to no design components.
While T-shirts and shapeless dresses might technically fit, we think plus size women deserve better. After all, fashion is all about expressing yourself.
Who ever heard of feeling beautiful in a shapeless, colorless cotton potato sack?
Aside from the disgusting snobbery flagrantly displayed by so many designers, there appears to be no rationale as to why plus size women are being ignored. Surely this is because it simply doesn’t make sense — not from a cultural or demographic standpoint, and certainly not from a monetary standpoint.
In leaving plus size women unacknowledged, designers are missing out on countless lucrative opportunities.
According to a recent study, over 100 million American women are larger than a size 12, and unless there’s a massive nudist colony we haven’t discovered yet, we’re pretty sure these women wear clothes.
Chances are, they’d like to look and feel great in those clothes, too.
We commend Gunn for living up to his name and firing well-deserved shots at the fashion industry.
For a business that prides itself on being at the forefront of creativity and innovation, it’s appalling that fashion cannot seem to wrap it’s mind around dressing women who aren’t what Gunn calls “seven-foot-tall glamazons.”
After all, fashion should be for everyone — not just those with visible hip bones.
