Fashion Before Plus-Size

Bodies, Bias, and the Birth of an Industry

Lauren Downing Peters (Columbia College Chicago, USA)

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Hardback

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English

Bloomsbury Visual Arts
07 September 2023

Fashion design & theory; Social & cultural history; Gender studies: women; Fashion & beauty industries

Series: Dress Cultures

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.

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.

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.

By: Lauren Downing Peters (Columbia College Chicago USA)
Imprint: Bloomsbury Visual Arts
Country of Publication: United Kingdom
Dimensions: Height: 234mm, Width: 156mm,
ISBN: 9781350172548
ISBN 10: 1350172545
Series: Dress Cultures
Pages: 216
Publication Date: 07 September 2023
Audience: College/higher education , Primary
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active

List of Figures Acknowledgments Introduction Fashion Before Plus-Size Re-fashioning Fat History The Slender Ideal, Fat Stigma & Weight Bias A History of Fashion Without Fashion A Note on Terminology Chapter Outline 1. Creating Consumers The New Normal Sizing Up Stoutness Beyond the “Perfect 36” The Problem With Fat 2. Designing for Disorder Building Better Bodies Modernist Fashions, Modernist Bodies Body-as-Canvas The Art & Science of Looking Slender 3. Fitting the Mind The Psychology of Selling Fat Bodies, Thin Skin Fat, Large or Stout? Small Advertisements for Large Sizes 4. Parables of Overweight The Parable of the Deluded The Parable of the Matron The Parable of the Domestic The Parable of the Style Blind 5. The Forgotten Woman The Everywoman: Jane Warren Wells The Vaudevillian: Sophie Tucker The Mother of the Blues: Gertrude “Ma” Rainey Conclusion Fashion’s Slenderness Imperative A Provocation: Toward and Epistemology of “Fat Clothes” Notes Bibliography Index

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.

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

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 fashion's obsession with body size and shape. * Joanne Entwistle, King's 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 *