The clothing industry is absolutely massive and is certainly one of the biggest industries in the world employing millions of people, especially in Asia. Imagine the number of factory workers and sales people and all the hauliers in between who are working in the textile industry. Possibly only the food industry is larger.
Despite all those people and all that money, there is not really a lot of money to be made from selling ordinary, everyday clothing. Just look at how cheap a T-shirt can be and it has most likely been made and brought from somewhere like Thailand – half a world away. A retailer has to sell a great deal of this stuff to make a living.
The big money in the clothing industry comes from unusual clothing. That is specialized garments and by ‘specialized garments’, here I am including high fashion, haute couture and designer clothing. People, especially women, like to keep up with the latest styles and in the realm of fashion a small fold here or a slight tuck there is all it takes to show that one skirt is this year’s fashion and that that one is last year’s.
Plus size clothing is an unusual case. Plus size clothing is expensive, but it was not fashionable for a long, long time. Manufacturers seemed to believe for decades that plus size people were content to wear black or garish colours. They seemed to think that plus sizers were not interested in fashion. Often the plus size department would be dumped next to the maternity department and not in the fashion section.
Even though the state of affairs is getting better for the plus size woman, the fabrics and the colours used in plus size clothing still tend to be different from those used for the sizes ten and twelve.
The colours are often flashier and the styling tends to make plus size women look older especially when they are dressed in formal evening wear.
The other option is to go to specialist plus size clothing shops, but this is where they have you again. Specialized fashion translates into very expensive, so very few large women can afford to obtain their wardrobe from these shops.
A good question to ponder upon is this: if there is a crisis of obesity in the western world in general, why does the fashion industry concentrate on smaller, often younger, women? Older, often heavier, women have more money that their younger counterparts too.
It is true that the situation is improving on the fashion front for plus sizers and people are also attempting to lose weight, so maybe the two sides will slowly draw nearer to one another.
In the meantime, larger ladies have to discover a way of making the world’s manufacturers of ladies clothing comprehend that they want fashionable plus size clothing made in exactly the same style, from exactly the same material and in exactly the same colours as the clothing that they make for smaller women.
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