Fashion Before Plus-Size: Bodies, Bias, and the Birth of an Industry

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In 2022, it was reported that plus-sizes accounted for nearly twenty percent of all womens apparel sales in the United States and was one of the industrys few growth sectors. For many, this news seemed to herald a remarkably inclusive turn for an industry that long bartered in exclusivity. Yet the recent success of plus-size fashion obscures a rather complicated historyone that can be traced back over a century, and which illuminates the fraught relationship between fashion, fat, and weight bias in American culture. Although many regard fat as a malady of the present, in the early twentieth century it was estimated that more than one-third of American women classified as overweight. While modern weight bias had yet to fully cement itself in the American imaginary, the limitations of mass garment manufacturing coupled with the ascendent slender beauty ideal had already relegated larger women to fashions peripheries. By 1915, however, fashion forecasters predicted that so-called stoutwear was well positioned to become one of the most lucrative subsectors of the burgeoning ready-to-wear trade. In the years that followed, stoutwear manufacturers set out to create more space for the fat woman in fashion but, in doing so, revealed an ancillary motivation: that of how to design fat out of existence altogether. Fashion Before Plus-Size considers what came before plus-size fashion while also shedding new light on the ways that the fashion industry not only perpetuates but produces weight bias. By situating stoutwear at the confluence of mass manufacturing, beauty ideals, standardized sizing, health discourse, and consumer culture, this book exposes the flawed foundations upon which the contemporary plus-size fashion industry has been built.

Reviews

In this impeccably researched and elegantly written book, Lauren Downing Peters explores the complexity of a topic that remains relevant even 100 years after the invention of stoutwear as a fashion category. In content and expression, it exemplifies the best of fashion scholarship and enhances the narrative of 20th-century fashion. * Nancy Deihl, New York University, USA *
A fascinating historical genealogy of what we now know today as plus-size fashion. Peters thorough and extensive historical scholarship, coupled with the clarity of her writing, make this book essential reading for anyone interested to understand the contemporary fashion industry and trace fashions obsession with body size and shape. * Joanne Entwistle, Kings College London, UK *
The first history of its kind, this book makes an indispensable contribution to the fields of fashion studies, fat studies and cultural history. * Francesca Granata, Parsons School of Design, The New School, USA *

Author Bio

Lauren Downing Peters is Assistant Professor of Fashion Studies and Director of the Fashion Study Collection at Columbia College Chicago. Her interdisciplinary research broadly explores the entanglements of dress, the body, and identity; histories of American fashion and style; and the past, present, and future of plus-size fashion.