Fashion For The Sixty-Seven Percent

A revolution in the plus-size market.

- Ashley C . Ford

When I was a kid, I wanted to design clothes. I kept a dollar store sketchbook and a case full of pencils. At first, I used them to trace and color in the clothes I liked in magazines. Eventually, I learned to sketch them on my own, from memory. They were bad drawings, but I was too excited to care much about that. I knew where the buttons and ruffles were supposed to go, and that was all I needed. One of my friends, a girl who had been heavy for as long as I’d known her, who was often cruelly picked on in classes, asked if I’d design something for her. I told her yes. My clothes would be made to fit everybody.

I began my freshman year of college double-majoring in fashion merchandising and apparel design. At the end of my first semester, a professor told me I would be better off changing my major. I had earned an A in her course—for the first time in my life, I was a perfect student. But I was already a size 12, inching closer and closer to 14 each day. My professor was also big, and she told me there was no place for a body like mine in the fashion world unless I was a man or a genius, so I was wasting my money and my time. I don’t believe she meant me harm. I believe she meant to save me: Her experience working in fashion as a fat woman had been abysmal. I wasn’t even comfortable enough to go into some stores at my size, so how was I going to design for them? I changed my major to psychology.