Fashion Before Plus-Size: Bodies, Beauty and the Birth of an Industry

In 2018, the plus-size fashion industry in the United States was valued at 21 billion dollars-or just over 20% of the women’s wear sector. For many, this rosy forecast seemed to herald a remarkably inclusive turn for an industry that long traded on exclusivity. In this unprecedented historical survey, Lauren Downing Peters shows that the picture is rather more complicated, with the industry’s current expansion just one milestone in a long, fraught relationship between fashion and fat spanning the 20th century.

Drawing upon a wealth of new archival materials, Fashion Before Plus-Size traces the origins of the plus-size fashion industry and reveals the conscious and unconscious biases that undergird fashion design discourse. By situating the stoutwear industry at the confluence of mass manufacturing, standardized sizing, and America’s ever-evolving relationship with health and weight, Fashion Before Plus-Size exposes how the earliest large-sized fashions reveal a deeply entrenched slenderness imperative that persists in the design and merchandizing of plus-size fashion to this day.