(PCM) The demand for stylish and high quality, yet affordable plus size fashion has been on the rise for a good number of years now, however the designers and the fashion industry overall do not want to accept it.
According to recent studies the average American woman is between a size 16 and size 18, however the overall majority of fashion designers outright refuse to create anything that is above a size 12. Do they not realize they are completely alienating a tremendous segment of the shopping population? Apparently they don’t seem to care.
Recently, Project Runaway host Tim Gunn ripped into the fashion industry for their failure to accept plus size women saying “I love the American fashion industry, but it has a lot of problems, and one of them is the baffling way it has turned its back on plus-size women. It’s a puzzling conundrum. The average American woman now wears between a size 16 and a size 18, according to new research from Washington State University. There are 100 million plus-size women in America, and, for the past three years, they have increased their spending on clothes faster than their straight-size counterparts. There is money to be made here ($20.4 billion, up 17 percent from 2013). But many designers — dripping with disdain, lacking imagination or simply too cowardly to take a risk — still refuse to make clothes for them.”
In fact, Gunn even went out and spoke with several designers asking them why they fail to create for this particular demographic and their answers broke our hearts. Gunn claims their response was “I’m not interested in her.” Why? “I don’t want her wearing my clothes.” Why? “She won’t look the way that I want her to look.”
Ouch! They are seriously discriminating against a very large group of people. We are thrilled to hear that Tim Gunn has shared his thoughts on the matter and hopefully the fashion industry will see the error of their ways in good time.