@article{1470408,
      recid = {1470408},
      author = {Downing Peters, Lauren,},
      title = {Fashion before plus-size : bodies, bias, and the birth of  an industry /},
      pages = {1 online resource (217 pages).},
      abstract = {In 2022, it was reported that plus-sizes accounted for  nearly twenty percent of all women's apparel sales in the  United States and was one of the industry's few growth  sectors. For many, this news seemed to herald a remarkably  inclusive turn for an industry that long bartered in  exclusivity. Yet the recent success of plus-size fashion  obscures a rather complicated history-one that can be  traced back over a century, and which illuminates the  fraught relationship between fashion, fat, and weight bias  in American culture. Although many regard fat as a malady  of the present, in the early twentieth century it was  estimated that more than one-third of American women  classified as "overweight." While modern weight bias had  yet to fully cement itself in the American imaginary, the  limitations of mass garment manufacturing coupled with the  ascendent slender beauty ideal had already relegated larger  women to fashion's peripheries. By 1915, however, fashion  forecasters predicted that so-called "stoutwear" was well  positioned to become one of the most lucrative subsectors  of the burgeoning ready-to-wear trade. In the years that  followed, stoutwear manufacturers set out to create more  space for the fat woman in fashion but, in doing so,  revealed an ancillary motivation: that of how to design fat  out of existence altogether. Fashion Before Plus-Size  considers what came "before" plus-size fashion while also  shedding new light on the ways that the fashion industry  not only perpetuates but produces weight bias. By situating  stoutwear at the confluence of mass manufacturing, beauty  ideals, standardized sizing, health discourse, and consumer  culture, this book exposes the flawed foundations upon  which the contemporary plus-size fashion industry has been  built.},
      url = {http://library.usi.edu/record/1470408},
}