FIT Institutional Repository

Title

From Data to Design: Rethinking Fashion's Approach to Plus Size Shoppers

Contributor Name

Dunn, Mallorie (Author, Research team head, Presenter)

Cordero, Margaret (Research team member)

Date

2025-04-11

Type

Moving Image

Lectures

Presentations (communicative events)

Research (documents)

Description

As of 2018 – the average US consumer wearing “womenswear” clothing – has a 38.1 inch waistline. Depending on the year and source – 67-72% of women, femmes, and non-binary folks wear plus sizes – with men similarly being 70%. Yet – in 2022 – only 19% of “womenswear” clothing sales came from plus sizes.

Looking around at mainstream fashion – advertisements, red carpets, runway shows – living and learning in a fatphobic society has skewed all of our views on bodies. We do not understand the reality of consumer size – or even what those sizes look like.

For this research grant, I measured 300 people who: live in the US, are 18 years and up, shop for "women's" clothing, and have a waistline of 34 in and up. The video presentation of this data goes over both the measurement data and also shopping habits + attitudes.

My mission behind proposing this grant is multi-layered. First, the industry wide error of ignoring plus size consumers must be addressed and to do so, it must be brought to the attention of fashion educators and fashion design students. Additionally - to properly educate design students on producing clothing for a full range of bodies, we need a full range of measurements in our educational resources. This data provides said information. And lastly, I want to present the additional shopping habits and attitudes to educators, students, and the NYC fashion industry to both help further convince and or further educate already interested parties into giving the plus size consumer the full attention, research, thoughtful design, and marketing that a majority population representative deserves.

In this submission - you will find:

- The video presentation of the grant reasearch which provides context, trends + correlations to the data, and shopping habits + attitudes of the participants

- A PDF of the slides used during the presentation

- A PDF of all of the body measurements of the participants, grouped into body area, with heights, and additional mean, median, and mode trends

- A PDF of the sizes and stores our participants typically shop in

Researcher: Mallorie Dunn, Adjunct Faculty, Fashion Design, CCPS, Pre-College
Student Researcher: Margaret Cordero

FIT President's Diversity Grant, Received 05/14/2024, Grant Title "Accurate Size Research: The Collection of Data and Vital Importance of Realistic Consumer Sizes"

Subject

Fashion design

Social sciences

Keyword

Fashion design

Technical design

Plus size fashion

Plus sizes

Measurements

Research

Rights

Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

In Copyright

The copyright for this work is held by its author/creator(s). Usage of this material beyond what is permitted by copyright law must first be cleared with the rights-holder(s). This work has been made available online by the Fashion Institute of Technology Gladys Marcus Library strictly for research and educational purposes. If you are the copyright holder for this work and have any objections to this work being made available online, please notify us immediately at [email protected].

Identifier

FIT Repository ID: fc_000123