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    Fashion Before Plus-Size: Bodies, Bias, and the Birth of an Industry

    Fashion Before Plus-Size by Downing Peters, Lauren;

    Bodies, Bias, and the Birth of an Industry

    Series: Dress Cultures;

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      • Publisher's listprice GBP 24.99
      • The price is estimated because at the time of ordering we do not know what conversion rates will apply to HUF / product currency when the book arrives. In case HUF is weaker, the price increases slightly, in case HUF is stronger, the price goes lower slightly.

        12 647 Ft (12 045 Ft + 5% VAT)
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      • Discounted price 11 383 Ft (10 841 Ft + 5% VAT)

    12 647 Ft

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    Estimated delivery time: In stock at the publisher, but not at Prospero's office. Delivery time approx. 3-5 weeks.
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    Product details:

    • Publisher Bloomsbury Visual Arts
    • Date of Publication 24 April 2025
    • Number of Volumes Paperback

    • ISBN 9781350399372
    • Binding Paperback
    • No. of pages pages
    • Size 232x156x18 mm
    • Weight 480 g
    • Language English
    • Illustrations 42 bw illus
    • 698

    Categories

    Long 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.

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    Table of Contents:

    List of Figures
    Acknowledgments

    Introduction
    Fashion Before Plus-Size
    Re-fashioning Fat History
    The Slender Ideal, Fat Stigma & Weight Bias
    A History of Fashion Without Fashion
    A Note on Terminology
    Chapter Outline

    1. Creating Consumers
    The New Normal
    Sizing Up Stoutness
    Beyond the "Perfect 36"
    The Problem With Fat

    2. Designing for Disorder
    Building Better Bodies
    Modernist Fashions, Modernist Bodies
    Body-as-Canvas
    The Art & Science of Looking Slender

    3. Fitting the Mind
    The Psychology of Selling
    Fat Bodies, Thin Skin
    Fat, Large or Stout?
    Small Advertisements for Large Sizes

    4. Parables of Overweight
    The Parable of the Deluded
    The Parable of the Matron
    The Parable of the Domestic
    The Parable of the Style Blind

    5. The Forgotten Woman
    The Everywoman: Jane Warren Wells
    The Vaudevillian: Sophie Tucker
    The Mother of the Blues: Gertrude "Ma" Rainey

    Conclusion
    Fashion's Slenderness Imperative
    A Provocation: Toward and Epistemology of "Fat Clothes"

    Notes
    Bibliography
    Index

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    Fashion Before Plus-Size: Bodies, Bias, and the Birth of an Industry

    Fashion Before Plus-Size: Bodies, Bias, and the Birth of an Industry

    Downing Peters, Lauren;

    12 647 HUF

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