Fashion Before Plus-Size

<p><b>Shortlisted for the Association of Dress Historians Book of the Year Award 2024</b> <p/>In 2022 it was reported that plus-sizes accounted for nearly twenty percent of all women's apparel sales in the United States and was one of the industry's 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 history-one that can be traced back over a century and which illuminates the fraught relationship between fashion fat and weight bias in American culture. <p/>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 fashion's 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. <p/><i>Fashion Before Plus-Size </i>considers what came before plus-size fashion while also shedding new light on the ways that the fashion industry not only perpetuates but <i>produces </i>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.</p>