Tim Gunn, co-host of the fashion competition series Project Runway and leading advocate for women’s fashion, ripped into the industry (including his show!) today with an incendiary commentary in the Washington Post on the treatment of plus-sized women by the fashion industry.
In it, he notes that there are more women in the US who wear a size 16 than a size 6, and that the average size is between a 16 and an 18. And yet, he writes:
“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….
“I’ve spoken to many designers and merchandisers about this. The overwhelming response is, “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.”
This is a particularly powerful critique in part because it is not coming from within the plus-size community. It is also interesting because Gunn critiques how his own show has handled plus-size fashion:
“Ashley Nell Tipton won the contest with the show’s first plus-size collection. But even this achievement managed to come off as condescending. I’ve never seen such hideous clothes in my life: bare midriffs; skirts over crinoline, which give the clothes, and the wearer, more volume; see-through skirts that reveal panties; pastels, which tend to make the wearer look juvenile; and large-scale floral embellishments that shout “prom.” Her victory reeked of tokenism.”
This is just not a critique of how the fashion industry handles size – it also looks at how mass media – from television to magazines – handle issues of fashion and size.
For more on this topic, see my other posts on body image.
It isn’t until the media/publications stop selling their souls and start providing real honest critiques of the non-sense they publish will people come out of the self induced coma of delusion. Rarely do we see a true glimpse of what American women look like today. Rather, the media chooses to mold our perception of who and what we are as people. Rarely are the diversities that makes this country strong shown on covers of magazines. Promoting beauty, confidence and intelligence of a typical American woman seems to relegated to only non-minority women. And the only inspiration I get from seeing one of these women is to fix and feed them at least a sandwich.