Although the field of fashion studies has historically encouraged incisive, curious and critical approaches to the study of fashion, it is not entirely unaffected by the fashion industry’s hierarchies and value systems.

Thus, even as fashion scholars have sought to foreground and re-activate overlooked and marginalized histories, a history of large-size dress and studies of the dress practices of fat women may have seemed off-limits for academic inquiry. The absence of studies of fat and fatness within the academic literature may therefore in part be attributed to private stigmas and prejudices held by scholars who struggle to understand fatness as anything but an incontrovertible public health hazard. Others are perhaps simply too invested in the norm of thinness and the contemporary views of health to be able to interrogate the operations of power therein (2010: 1). Others might mistakenly consider fat a natural category that is merely descriptive and thus not to be considered with a critical eye. Having no interest group worthy of note, fat is not a category worthy of critique, such academics might assume. Some might consider fat a marginal identity category that is reclaimed by only a few on the radical fringe. Indeed, as fat studies scholar Elena Levy-Navarro has speculated, First and foremost, this neglect is symptomatic of the fact that fat and fatness remain under-examined topics of study within academia at large, which is itself the product of a number of complex and somewhat evasive factors. While I had discovered an elusive “gap” in the scholarship, I was not, however, entirely prepared for the extent to which the fat, female body had been written out of fashion’s histories.Īt times the absence of the fat, female body in the spaces and places of fashion felt insurmountable however, during tenure at the Centre for Fashion Studies, I came to attribute this lack to two separate but related biases. While the future of plus-size fashion has become the subject of near endless debate as brands are slowly waking up to the fact that it’s a $21 billion missed opportunity, its past has gone largely unacknowledged. In seeking to reconstruct the early history of “plus-size” fashion-or what in the early twentieth century was charmingly known as “stoutwear”-I realized quite early on that I would face an uphill battle.

at the Centre for Fashion Studies at Stockholm University, I became all too familiar with the biases and blind spots that pervade the fashion literature. at Parsons School of Design, The New School and later during my Ph.D. Kimberly’s project could not be more apt or timely.įirst during my M.A. By addressing “the intersection of power, privilege, representation, and aesthetics within the fashion system,” Kimberly wants to reconcile fashion’s “partisan,” and I would argue racist, worldview by making freely available a curated collection of documents, traces, and commentaries on the intersections of fashion and race. Speaking to this point, in a recent AHTR post my colleague and friend Kimberly Jenkins discussed how she has sought to unravel this bias through her digital humanities project, The Fashion and Race Database. The privileging of these so-called “hemline histories,” however, has problematically been at the expense of stories that recount everyday dress practices and the fashion histories of the marginal, the non-Western and, perhaps most importantly, the non-White. Much as in the discipline of art history, the history of fashion has tended to focus on the stories and output of great designers, or the artists of our field.

Fat female body with back copy space