Paying the Fat Penalty: Women’s Extended-Sized Clothing

A Land’s End catalog landed in my mailbox the other day. Or was it LL Bean? I still get those confused. Whichever it was, it was focused on women’s clothing. And the fat penalty was on full and unapologetic display.

You haven’t heard of the fat penalty? It’s rampant in the clothing industry, so much so that we’ve been conditioned to shrug it off as simply a way of doing business — an industry standard. It’s the practice of charging more money for “extended” sizes.

Specifically, retailers will charge one price for their “regular” sizes — usually up to a size 16 or, if they’re feeling generous, an 18. Anything beyond that (if they even acknowledge that women larger than this exist by offering more sizes — a whole other problem recently addressed by Ijeoma Oluo) gets labeled as “extended sizes” and priced higher than the “regular” sizes. In the case of the catalog I flipped through last week, the fat penalty was $10 per item.

It’s an interesting mind game. First of all, even the label “extended size” implies that wearing these sizes is a deviation from normalcy. However, it’s certainly not. A study published last year by the International Journal of Fashion Design found that the AVERAGE size of an American woman is now a Misses 16–18. And, yes, I understand that statistics can be complex, but for the sake of this discussion, let’s assume that this means there are as many women on the “above” side of this average as below. As a consequence, you can only qualify as being a “regular”-sized woman by in fact being a below average-sized woman. And if you happen to land on the “above” side of the average, you are going to be labeled as a “plus”-sized woman who can only fit into “extended”-sized clothing.

Instead of rightfully wondering what is wrong with a business practice that includes labelling only below average-sized clothes as “regular” sizes, retailers instead turn the tables on larger women, convincing them that the problem is with their bodies rather than the sizing strategy. And woman have been told for so long and in so many ways that their bodies — especially if they are larger women — are unacceptable, that they absorb this practice with the casual shame that colors so much of their self-perception.

So we live in a world where there are as many size-20 woman as size-6 woman; by that measure either size could equally be considered perfectly normal. But instead, we have an industry that has convinced themselves — and us — that any woman above the average size of 16–18 is not worthy of being considered normal in terms of clothing sizes.

But wait — why would they do that when it eliminates half of their potential customers? Actually, an increasing number of retailers have figured out just that — that they can double their potential market by offering clothing on both sides of average. But by calling one set of customers “plus-sized,” they set up the system we have today. They can smugly enter the extended size market because they care about all women and their struggles to find clothing choices — while at the same time charging those women the fat penalty. Pretty slick.

The most common excuse for the fat penalty is that the larger the size of a garment, the more raw material is required to make it — therefore the material expense is higher (and justifies the higher price tag). True enough. But this obvious fact is true for many items that are sized differently to accommodate a range of human sizes. Consider shoes. Clearly larger shoe sizes require more raw material. Yet we don’t see shoes divided into regular and plus sizes which are then priced differently. Shoe manufacturers realize that some sizes will require more raw material and set their prices to accommodate that fact accordingly.

This is clearly not the case with women’s clothing. Instead, we receive catalogs like the one I paged through last week, every item from a $20 tee shirt to a $150 jacket marked up a flat $10 for the extended sizes. That $10 price increase represented anywhere from a 5–50% mark up for women whose bodies didn’t happen to be below average in size. Clearly, this was not just a matter of covering additional material cost, or the mark-up would be a more consistent percentage of the base item’s cost. This is charging one set of customers more because you can. Period. It’s the fat penalty.

I work for a clothing retailer, one that also builds recreational equipment. To the best of my knowledge, they have never sold larger sized bikes or hiking boots at jacked-up prices compared to the smaller versions of these items. They recently announced they will be entering the women’s extended size clothing market. As far as I know, they haven’t announced their pricing strategy for this new line. But I’ll be watching carefully. Wherever you do your shopping, you should too.