"The Plus Side"

"Historically, plus-size apparel has had a conservative look. Its unofficial name, I quickly gathered at Full Figured Fashion Week, was “fat-girl clothes.” The clothes were heavy on basics—items like plain T-shirts—in stretchy materials and dark colors. They usually conformed to a set of generally accepted rules about what plus-size women should wear. No one can decide who wrote the rules (perhaps it was the principal of a very strict all-girls school), but everyone could rattle them off: Nothing tight or body-hugging. No crop tops. No loud colors. No patterns. No horizontal stripes. As a result, the plus section became the land of the mom jean and the muumuu—of dresses that were less fashion statement and more “tent to hide your body,” as one woman put it.

There is also the matter of terminology: in the plus-size world, sizes 0 to 12 are generally called “straight”—or, occasionally, by department-store buyers, “missy”—never “standard” or “regular.” Terms for larger sizes keep piling up. “When I started, they called them ‘mama sizes,’ ” Boos said—an expression still used by some Chinese manufacturers. Then came “women’s” sizes, followed by “full-figured,” which was popularized by lingerie sellers. The more assertive “plus” arrived in the past decade. Lately, it has been losing traction to “curvy,” though some people think that favors an hourglass physique. An alternative movement has long pushed to reclaim the word “fat.” “It’s a big controversy,” Boos told me. “We haven’t landed on the word that pleases everybody, and, frankly, I don’t know if we ever will.”...

Once “average” fat people came on the scene, Farrell writes, “fat denigration” became more common: fat jokes proliferated in nineteenth-century magazines.


Clothing changed, too: with manufactured garments came standardized sizes. People used to sew their own clothes (or, if they were wealthy, hired tailors), so they made clothes that fit their body’s shape. But factory-made clothes came in predetermined sizes. (In 1939 and 1940, the U.S. Department of Agriculture conducted a survey of fifteen thousand women’s bodies to devise commercial standards.) Suddenly, it became important for your body to fit your clothes, instead of the other way around: it was possible to try on a skirt in a store and think, My legs are too short, or My butt’s too big.

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/09/22/bigger-better

This is a fascinating history. Fashion is important, clothing and self-presentation are important components of self-ownership and empowerment

FB: An immersive history of "plus size clothing" and today's renaissance
"The blogger Marie Denee, one of the panelists, said, “The marketers still think that we’re in transition. They can’t accept a plus-size woman who isn’t waiting to be a smaller size.”"