Comments on: No, being fat isn’t identical to being black. No, that doesn’t make fat activism illegitimate.

By: Alas, a blog » Blog Archive » Against the “replace ______ with the word black” school of criticism

Tue, 24 Feb 2009 07:52:02 +0000

[...] Third, it implies that racism — and in particular, historic US racism against Blacks — is the platonic ideal of bigotry, against which other bigotries are measured. Other forms of bigotry are in turn only objectionable to the degree that they resemble bigotry against Blacks. This is then turned against other groups. [...]

By: Fat So Funny « mooreroom

Fat So Funny « mooreroom — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 16:22:16 +0000

[...] gluttons. And there the conversation ends. But I’ll let Barry have the last word, because he puts it so well: The reason fat activists have formed a movement is that it’s unjust to be denied good medical [...]

By: thethorninyour

thethorninyour — Mon, 20 Oct 2008 21:21:45 +0000

big and tall and plus sized clothing costs more because we are a captive audience. especially when talking about designer clothes like Nautica or Polo. Manufacturers and stores charge more because they can. it is as simple as that.
Just like a movie theater that charges $8 for a bucket of popcorn or a $7 beer at the ballpark. Retailers when asked often resort to the “more fabric” argument. This argument is crap. If that was the case a small would cost less than an XL because there is more difference in fabric between a small and an XL than there is between an XL and a 2XLT. If pricing by size is the norm, why are mens shoes sizes 6-13 all the same size; or mens suits, sizes 40S thru 48L all one one size, or bras, 30A thru 38D all one size. Retailers also pass the buck to the manufacturers, saying they have no control over the pricing since items such as Nautica or Ralph Lauren polo shirts come into the store pre-priced, and pricing is dictated by buying agreements. They fail to understand that when price goes down, sales go up. If the big and tall sizes were the same as the regular sizes, they would probably sell more. Add to this the marketing advantage of being able to advertise to big and tall and plus size customers “come shop at our store, we don’t charge you more for your size”

Bottom line, they do it because they can, and because we let them. More people need to let them know we don’t like being discriminated against.

6ft, 265,
52L suit
2XLT shirts
42 inch waist.
19 neck, 37.5 sleeve, dress shirts.

By: don't ya wish your girlfriend was smart like me?

don't ya wish your girlfriend was smart like me? — Sat, 12 Apr 2008 05:15:15 +0000

GOOD READ: Marginalized groups don’t have the same experiences, but that doesn’t make their fights invalid

[...]Excellent post at Alas, A Blog about why comparing fat activism (or any other “lesser” discrimination) to anti-racism (or any other more “legitimate” discrimination) is misguided-that the fact that oppressions are different doesn’t make any f…

By: iiii

iiii — Sun, 06 Apr 2008 18:20:59 +0000

Twenty years ago, when I could still buy clothes in “regular” stores, I noticed that the 12-16s always seemed to sell out first and the stuff on the extreme discount rack always seemed to be 4s and 6s. So I asked the clerks. They told me that manufacturers would only fill orders with an equal number of all sizes offered. If a retailer wanted to order a dozen units in a size 14, they had to take a dozen units each of all sizes 4-16, whether or not they thought there was any chance of the size 4s selling. The unsellable small-sized garments amounted to an surcharge on each order. I don’t know if that system is still in place.

In the cases where clothes for fat people use lots more cloth than clothes for thin people, it’s because the pattern makers scaled up from the fit model in all dimensions, including length. 3X t-shirts are as much as a foot longer than a small. Which means, after they make me pay extra for the extra fabric, I pay a seamstress even more to hem the damn things back to a wearable length.

By: Dr. Psycho

Dr. Psycho — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 22:25:00 +0000

There is nothing The Man likes better than to keep the inhabitants of the various corrals on his plantation separate.

God forbid we should ever, you know, work together against our common enemy.

By: Karen

Karen — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 21:14:38 +0000

What I love is that when shopping for shorts for my little girl, I find that boys’ shorts are both more modest in cut (more fabric) yet cheaper in cost. It can only have to do with cultural norms–that even a *toddler* girl should be showing more skin than a boy, and should pay more for the privilege!

By: Bisi Adu

Bisi Adu — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 09:44:56 +0000

……also because they are unused to being contradicted on this kind of question. Too funny, too sad

Also not specific to black people, when it’s pointed out that there are some similiarities between the purported duty of a fat person trying to force themselves to become slim(mer) and a gay person trying to force themselves to become straight(er), you get a whole lot of upset and gays were put in Auschwitz et al. This kind of misplaced propretorial sensitivity is not unique to (some) blacks.

By: Angel H.

Angel H. — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 21:39:04 +0000

^^^ The board welcomes S/He-Who-Needs-to-Get-a-Clue.

By: Mmmmm Hmmmm

Mmmmm Hmmmm — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 01:02:01 +0000

POC are MORE oppressed than fat people (you know she’s actually thinking ANYBODY), and we don’t like you making comparisons to our oppression, so we’re going to take our ball and go home and not play with you any more.

I’m sure the author of that Oppression Olympics piece will be missed.

By: beware_the_sluagh

beware_the_sluagh — Sun, 30 Mar 2008 23:36:21 +0000

With regards to clothes:
(uses Australasian sizes - I believe size 6 here = size 0 in USA?) Generally a pattern is made at the standard size, eg. size 10, and graded up to size 12 and 14 and down to 8 and 6. Grading means you add or take off a little to create different sizes. This is only really an approximation, and you can only do this a certain amount before you actually need to change the SHAPE of the pattern, not just the SIZE.
To make a size 16, you might make a size 20 pattern, and grade down to 16 and 18 and up to 22 and 24. So you have to pay someone to draft and test an entirely new pattern, which is comparatively expensive (comparative to grading). If most people are size 12-14 (?) then most people would be covered by the 6-14 basic pattern. To make the “plus sizes” there is extra cost. However, surely there are quite a lot of people in the 16-24 range so the extra cost wouldn’t be that much when spread out? I haven’t worked in the industry so don’t know what the actual costs are, but to charge a significant amount more seems a bit suspicious.
Larger people aren’t just larger, they are a different shape from smaller people (speaking generally, because obviously pretty much everyone is a different shape from everyone else) and so making patterns for larger people that aren’t crap is difficult for those who are not specialists in that area - most designers and pattern-makers are trained in the sample size - size 10.
The sensible thing to do would be to make the “base” or standard size the same as your average person :D Then all the models would have to be average too….

With regards to amount of material, in home sewing the width of the material sometimes necessitates buying twice as much material when you bump up to a larger size, but in industry they would be making multiple garments so they can lay out the pieces far more efficiently meaning this wouldn’t happen.
One would obviously need more material for a size 24 than a size 6. So, although there wouldn’t be much difference in material from a size 14 to a 16, they might price one band (16-24) more expensive than the other band (6-14) based on average costs. However once again, labour is the expense in modern manufacturing, not materials.

I wonder if the price increase really does have any substantial justification in costs? Obviously we can argue whether it does or not, but only the manufacturers would know. Small manufacturers would have this as more of a concern than larger ones as they have to spread the pattern making cost and possibly others over fewer items. Other than that, it seems like a bad business decision overall because it annoys people and does not generate loyal customers…

By: Acheman

Acheman — Sun, 30 Mar 2008 22:56:47 +0000

Since the error was generated by an English speaker, it’s more than possible that another speaker of Latin as a second or other language might have generated it, and if they did so, the possibility that it would have been spoken is fairly high, given that silent reading was uncommon. When the Empire was full-blown there were many such speakers; they probably learned poetry by heart, but their slight infecility with Latin grammar may have caused the production of a few errors in the recital. I can imagine such a situation occurring with the greatest of ease. It’s our own ideas about the infallibility of the ancients that suggest otherwise.

A serious note to justify this comment: one thing I did come across in my Googletrawl to find clothing size statistics was commentary on the way women’s sizing in particular serves to normalise certain sets of bodily proportions over others. Whereas men’s clothes are usually sized by reference to specific measurements of the clothes - collar size with shirts, for example - women’s clothes usually have the same sizes available for all items. As a result, if, as is pretty common, a woman has a different size in trousers to her size in t-shirts, there’s a corresponding implication of ‘ill-proportion’, which is hard to shake off. And it’s significant, too, that men’s trouser sizing acknowledges that leg length and waist size are (oh marvel of marvels!) relatively independent of one another. The article didn’t, however, discuss the obvious exception posed by the S M L XL etc system, which is used for clothing for both genders and which obviously has its own strongly normative connotations; one of the reasons it was relatively easy for me to imagine the clothing-size distribution having a left-skewed hump was that this sizing system presents it as such, creating a ‘normalised’ range S-L, with XL, XXL, XXXL and so on presented as ever more elaborately marginalised.

By: Tom Nolan

Tom Nolan — Sun, 30 Mar 2008 20:55:36 +0000

Acheman

It’s a poem by Catullus - I suppose it’s possible that sometime, somewhere an aficionado of Latin poetry - one with a really bizarre speech defect - might have recited the “s” as a “t” or the “d” as an “h”, but what are the chances?

By: Acheman

Acheman — Sun, 30 Mar 2008 15:51:41 +0000

This should be relatively easy to settle if it were possible to get hold of a decent set of statistics about the sales of different clothing sizes. The point about larger sizes being rarer and so selling less just sounds wrong, because there’s no corresponding phenomenon with small sizes, although all the same issues with smaller runs ought to apply. There are several explanations I can think of for this:
It’s possible that there are a greater number of unique large sizes - in other words, that the right tail of the graph would be longer, with the ‘hump’ appearing to be shifted to the left. This could be because of a genuine distribution difference, or it could be that people who require clothes that are much smaller than average have an easy-ish recourse in children’s clothes, which in the UK at least aren’t taxed, whereas people who require larger clothes remain within the adult-clothing market.
The other explanation I can think of is that whereas there are higher overheads for small clothing, which would appear to mandate higher prices, most people probably believe in an unreflective kind of way that when they buy clothing, they are mostly buying fabric, and won’t accept higher prices for small clothing. I’d also suspect that the clothing industry prefers to maintain this illusion, since people probably feel subjectively more like they’re getting a ‘fair bargain’ when they feel that prices are based on what they receive rather than external market forces. I’m leaning towards this explanation myself, but it would be much easier to answer it with stats, and although the stats are out there of course they are very commercially valuable and so can’t be obtained for free, as I discovered after a frustrating google search.
Also,

It is quite certain that those words have never been spoken. It should be “prodeas” not “proheas”, and “comas”, not “comat”.

Not true. You are assuming that latin was only ever spoken in accordance with strict classical grammar rules.

By: Bjartmarr

Bjartmarr — Sun, 30 Mar 2008 02:02:46 +0000

I find it far more likely that retailers charge more for larger sizes for the simple reason that they can get away with it.

The reason that they can get away with it might have to do with fat people having fewer choices, or it may just be that people expect to pay more for bigger clothes (due to more fabric), so they do.

By: Joe

Joe — Sun, 30 Mar 2008 01:41:36 +0000

Eva, one other thing to consider is tooling and inventory costs. If the pattern is cut by machine the larger base might require it’s own die, or program. If it’s the later than you’ll have costs associated with change over and quality control. Additionally if they have to buy 15 XXL shirts, and hold them for 6 months before they sell (compared with 150 M shirts that will sell in 6 weeks) there will be costs associated with that.

I don’t know much about making clothing but I’m pretty knowledgeable about making a lot of other things. You’d be surprised at how the costs climb for low volume runs.

By: Tom Nolan

Tom Nolan — Sat, 29 Mar 2008 22:53:23 +0000

nobody.really

“Splendidas quatiunt comat t Sed moraris, abit dies ; ProHeas, nova nupta.”…For all I know, THOSE words were never spoken.

It is quite certain that those words have never been spoken. It should be “prodeas” not “proheas”, and “comas”, not “comat”.

Quid sibi vult?

By: Eva

Eva — Sat, 29 Mar 2008 21:19:07 +0000

When I buy (new or used) clothing I’m paying for (not necessariy in this order): a. good design; b. quality of fabric; c. brand reliability/sewing/contruction; d. size; e. fit.

I feel like I’m paying for the “priviledge” of buying a plus size version of an item from a big brand retailer, like LLBean, or Lands End, which usually sells an attractive, sturdy type of item (if a bit boring-ok). While I find Lane Bryant’s prices to be fair, sometimes even less than other retailers known for smaller sizes, but the quality of the clothing at Lane Bryants is lower, sometimes much lower, than the other retailers mentioned above.

The retailers charge what they think they can get away with. I wonder how often people protest the price of items that are 15% or 20% higher but only a fraction larger? I think I’m going make some noise about this the next time I shop and see what happens.

By: Michael

Michael — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 21:32:12 +0000

This sort of off-topic topic has me intrigued. I am a fairly standard size so I have never thought much about price differences in clothing size. So first I have a question:

Is this pricing issue true only in stores that sell a whole range of sizes or is it also true that on average clothing costs more at plus-size or big-and-tall stores?

Second, it might be a cost issue but not related to amount of fabric. In order to encourage the most number of shoppers, stores prefer to carry a wide range of options. But I imagine it might be difficult for a store to titrate the number of dresses it needs to carry in sizes that are outside of the most common. So that at the end of the season, a store might have a lot more large sizes left on the racks than smaller sizes. That unsold clothing, even if it gets moved to a discount branch, etc, still constitutes a loss. A small price increase in those less-demanded sizes might help alleviate that loss. I base this hypothesis on one observation: if you ever hit a shirt sale at its end, you usually find a few S and a bunch of XXL, but no M, L, or XL.

By: Robert

Robert — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 21:01:11 +0000

Yeah, that.