You might think that the unending publicity about people getting fatter combined with a modest amount of observation that people like dressing well would lead to the conclusion that there are a lot of people who’d pay plenty, but it doesn’t seem to register.
It may be a bit more complicated than just bias vs. financial incentive. Just because you want to provide plus-size clothing, doesn’t mean you have any idea how to design for the market, or that it’s actually profitable for a given store to try to reach the plus-size market. (Among the problems: what parts of a person are “plus-sized” can vary considerably!)
The manufacturers my wife buys from for her lingerie store’s inventory generally have some sort of plus sizes, but it’s hard for her to carry enough variety of things that would actually “work” for a wide enough variety of women to offset the carrying cost in floor space and inventory investment. As a plus-sized woman herself, my wife found this annoying, but as a businesswoman, she shrank the selection to reflect the financial reality of the matter.
(Another local lingerie store, one that actually chose to focus its entire inventory and marketing on plus-sized women, went belly-up in relatively short order, though of course most new businesses do.)
It’s certainly true that it would take a good bit of capital and knowledge to do a significant job of supplying plus size clothing which is as fashionable and well made as the what’s now available for thinner women, but it’s a little surprising that no one’s managed it. I was thinking more about manufacturers than retailers—retailers can’t sell what doesn’t exist.
Your wife’s problem does reflect a hard constraint—fat women will have all the variation in skeletal proportions and muscle that thin and medium build women do plus a lot of variation in fat distribution.
If you check back at the link in my previous post, there’s one fat woman who says things have gotten better, in contrast to several others who say it’s mostly worse.
It may be a bit more complicated than just bias vs. financial incentive. Just because you want to provide plus-size clothing, doesn’t mean you have any idea how to design for the market, or that it’s actually profitable for a given store to try to reach the plus-size market. (Among the problems: what parts of a person are “plus-sized” can vary considerably!)
The manufacturers my wife buys from for her lingerie store’s inventory generally have some sort of plus sizes, but it’s hard for her to carry enough variety of things that would actually “work” for a wide enough variety of women to offset the carrying cost in floor space and inventory investment. As a plus-sized woman herself, my wife found this annoying, but as a businesswoman, she shrank the selection to reflect the financial reality of the matter.
(Another local lingerie store, one that actually chose to focus its entire inventory and marketing on plus-sized women, went belly-up in relatively short order, though of course most new businesses do.)
It’s certainly true that it would take a good bit of capital and knowledge to do a significant job of supplying plus size clothing which is as fashionable and well made as the what’s now available for thinner women, but it’s a little surprising that no one’s managed it. I was thinking more about manufacturers than retailers—retailers can’t sell what doesn’t exist.
Your wife’s problem does reflect a hard constraint—fat women will have all the variation in skeletal proportions and muscle that thin and medium build women do plus a lot of variation in fat distribution.
If you check back at the link in my previous post, there’s one fat woman who says things have gotten better, in contrast to several others who say it’s mostly worse.