Not Plus Enough
- adrienne490
- Feb 10, 2017
- 4 min read
Dress by SimplyBe USA
So here it goes. Those who say I’m not plus enough, or better yet, not plus at all.
It’s hard to describe how surreal it feels after spending most of my adult life at 5′9″ and hovering around 200 lbs, fluctuating - depending on the label - between a size 12 to 16, to be told that I’m not actually a plus size.
So whose definition of “plus size” are we working with? Karl Lagerfeld and the rest of the haute couturiers? Karl himself said back in 2009 that “no one wants to see a plus-size woman walk down the runway.” In Karl’s world, that’s anyone over the size of 2. Money constraints aside, should I decide to walk into a Chanel boutique (or Prada, Fendi, Marchesa, etc, etc,) to purchase a dress or gown from the current collection, there would be absolutely nothing for me to buy, save for a handbag or some faux pearl earrings. I’m not even sure if they have shoes to fit my size 10 feet.
Top fashion designers have made their voices clear - they do not want their clothes on my (plus) size 14 body. They still wouldn’t even if I managed to diet and exercise my way down to a size 10. We certainly know that they don’t even want to dress celebrities on the red carpet who are over a certain size, 4 usually.
Am I an #inbetweenie, a medium-sized woman, somewhere in the limbo between “Misses” and “Plus”? That doesn’t seem quite right either. I have never really felt like a true Misses size because ever though a size 10 or 12 might have been available from the label I was shopping, it was rare to actually find one in the store, let alone in an entire coordinated outfit. I’ve spent most of my life living in and around NYC and like a gawky, bloated moose was how I perceived myself to look and feel most of the time, relative to either the tall and lanky “supermodel” type or the petite, toned women that I was mostly surrounded by. Women who could actually shop at sample sales.
The only time I feel like a medium anything is if I am in a plus-size specialty retailer’s store or website. There I feel that there is a wide range of clothes - both in sizes above and below mine - that give me the choices of fit and style that I am seeking.
I discussed in a previous post my current challenges in jean shopping and how my weight seems to be not disappearing, but redistributing itself. I am now more top heavy while my legs have gotten thinner and my butt is flattening. Two things I’m actually really not happy about. Meanwhile, my upper torso and arms/neck are thickening. Perimenopause? Maybe. Aging? Probably. Either way frustrating. The bulk of my wardrobe now doesn’t fit correctly or not at all, or might if I had individual pieces professionally tailored. Expensive and time consuming.
So then someone sees a photo of me on social media and declares with utmost authority that I am clearly no more than a size 10 (which I haven’t been since I was 18 yrs old) and therefore not plus size. Sorry? So this one awesomely flattering photo of me - and there are SO few - (I don’t take a lot of selfies or photos of myself in general) now has gotten me kicked out of the plus-size club?
Oh and then there’s the plight of the small-chested plus-sized woman. Have you tried shopping for a 44B bra? If you then find one, were you mortified to discover that you didn’t even fill out the molded cup? That’s a cold and lonely section of the plus-size world, I can tell you. Two pregnancies, months of nursing and multiple weight gains and losses have taken their toll on my breasts probably more than any other body part.
If I tried getting work as a model (age issues aside) how would an agency categorize me? I’m guessing plus-size. If the average American woman wears a size 16 to 18, then should the term plus-size now only refer to woman larger than that, say size 20 or more?
Many companies and individuals are challenging not just society's views on body type, but specifically the fashion industry's as well. Just today, Dia&Co. took out a full page ad in the New York Times Style section admonishing designers to #movefashionforward and start dressing the over 100 million plus size women in the US alone. It is not size 0 teenagers that should be catered too, but the adult women averaging a size 14 or more that have the money and desire to purchase flattering fashion that is made for their bodies.
Dia&Co. is a monthly subscription styling service that caters to women specifically sized 14 and up. They strongly believe that style has nothing to do with a woman's size. A whopping 78% of plus size women polled by Dia said that they would spend more money on clothing if designers were more size inclusive and made clothes in the sizes they needed.
I’ve never been a fan of labels of any kind. They simply serve to further divide us, I think, rather than help us to find any common ground. Does a size 12 woman have the same shopping challenges as a size 22 woman? No, I’m sure she doesn’t. But right now, the plus-sized umbrella covers a very broad area, and I think there’s room for pretty much all of us underneath it. At least 67% of us, anyway.
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