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LucasSloan comments on Financial incentives don't get rid of bias? Prize for best answer. - Less Wrong
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I think that the reason that people don't sell good clothing for fat women is the intersection of existing manufacturers not wanting to sell clothing for fat women, because doing so would lower their status, and fat women don't want to buy good clothing from exclusively for fat women retailers, because doing so would lower their status. I wish I could see a way to take advantage of this market opportunity. Does anyone have any ideas?
Status is part of it, but there's a perfectly good statistical explanation too.
There is much higher variance among fat people than among thin people. It's the long tail of the distribution. So plus sizes are much more approximate. It's more likely that the clothes won't fit. This also makes the return on each additional size lower -- there may be a lot of plus-size women generally, but they're spread out enough that there aren't a lot of size 16s specifically.
I don't think that accounts for everything, but it is part of it.
You're already seeing more good plus-size fashion, I think, of necessity. It's coming.
Maybe it would make sense to sell clothes that are very easy to "let out" at home. I could imagine, for instance, a skirt that you could add extra pleating to with snaps or buttons inside the waistband. You could put it on the rack with all the buttons done, so the customer doesn't need to be seen shopping in a "fat section" and the exact same style would be of a type open to thin women, and it could triple in possible size if you undid them all without needing to be made of an unflattering stretchy fabric. If one needed to undo some but not all of the pleats, the choice of which to undo would be a nifty bit of extra customization.
Man, now I want a skirt like that. Or four.
Please post about how the skirt works out. I think the additional fabric will bunch up when the skirt is in its smaller mode, but I could be mistaken.
I have a skirt with a lot of fabric in it that gathers up at an (elastic) waist. I imagine my idea would wind up working much the same way. It looks fine and it's comfortable and twirly! I do think it would be important to make the button-waist skirt out of a thin, ideally woven fabric.
Maybe. I still think the fact that it was in any way designed for fat people, even if usable by thin people, would cause the status concerns. Also, clothing that you (assuming you don't have crazy seamstressing skills) modify tend not to be "good" clothing which was what the OP was about.
I find myself tempted to sell the idea just because I personally really want a skirt like this. That probably means that I should sell it to my mom, as opposed to Less Wrong, because she might sew me one without needing to think it's an entrepreneurial bonanza. But I think people besides me might buy them!
I think that people will buy them, just not enough to get them into stores. Online distribution allows for small volume manufacturing.
I just e-mailed my mom. If I can get her to make me one and it's as awesome as I think it is, then there will exist a pattern and a prototype.
I think the level of prejudice is so high that you'd need a good bit of money and a lot of dedication to do it on the large scale. I keep thinking it would take ten million dollars to start a mass production clothing company, but this is only a guess. Does anyone here have a well-founded estimate?
As for the smaller scale, here's some of what's going on. If you're not up for starting the big company, you might find a small business which is worth investing in.
How sure are you that fat women won't shop at a places that offer good clothing only for fat women? My first thought was that your theory is nonsense, but then I realized I'd been reading fat acceptance material for so long that I don't really know.
Maybe it's just that the hypothetical business would need to advertise.
Those websites have some pretty things. (Including items I wouldn't expect to be marketed to any size in particular - really, scarves?) I wonder how large-scale a movement towards the availability of pretty clothes for plus sizes would need to be before large, pretty clothes started reliably being available in thrift stores? (I have been spoiled by $3 garments and wince whenever I look at retail prices -.-)