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Further Details Title: Fashion Before Plus-Size Condition: New Description: Shortlisted for the Association of Dress Historians Book of the Year Award, 2024 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. Author: Lauren Downing Peters Format: Paperback EAN: 9781350399372 Country/Region of Manufacture: GB ISBN-10: 135039937X Subtitle: Bodies, Bias, and the Birth of an Industry ISBN: 9781350399372 Publisher: Bloomsbury Visual Arts Release Date: 04/24/2025 Language: English Item Height: 234mm Item Length: 156mm Genre: Business & Finance Topic: Fashion & Design Series: Dress Cultures Item Width: 18mm Item Weight: 480g Release Year: 2025 Missing Information? Please contact us if any details are missing and where possible we will add the information to our listing.