[…]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…

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.

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

……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.

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

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…

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

“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?

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.

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.

The term is HAES, which stands for Health At Every Size.

HEAS should have been HAS or HAAS, I dunno. Healthy at any size, in any event.

Why wouldn’t plus size clothes cost more? They use more fabric. Fabric is the principal component of the items.

If that were the case, Robert, then all clothing of all sizes would be priced on a scale relating to how much fabric it took. Preemie baby clothes would be dirt cheap, and a size 2 adult would cost slightly less than a size 6 adult would cost slightly less than a size 10 adult. Except oops, it doesn’t work that way, does it? Just as Roberta points out, manufacturers easily eat the extra costs of more fabric if the size range is within “normal” (guh) sizes, and also eat the extra cost of more detailed construction on smaller sizes.

You obviously don’t sew. I’m another who does, and I can tell you that there’s far more cost (in labor and funds) to garment construction than how many yards of fabric there is. How simple or complex the pattern is to draft to different sizes is one aspect; so is how simple or complex the finishing features and construction. And having looked at many many patterns I can tell you that the size difference of a pattern piece from a size 10, say, to a size 18 is still measured in fractions of an inch, not even close to justifying a price hike like the ones plus sized consumers have to pay for badly constructed and fitted clothes.