Where Have All of the Plus Size Stores Gone?

Dear Budget Fashionista,

What is happening to big size fashion?  It’s becoming harder and harder to find”nice” brands of large size clothing, especially at a bargain. Is this a trend? The new, West Coast”flagship” Bloomingdale’s opened in downtown San Francisco with NO women sizes above 14!  And the 14s are few and far between.  What’s the rationale?

Response:

The shrinking size of plus size departments in your favorite shops has to do both with money and the”image” the store is trying to project. I have been told by”and size specialists” that, and I quote,”plus size women don’t like to spend any money on their clothes.”   Whether this is true or not is debatable, but what I do know is that lots of stores wish to compete to the younger audience that worships starving celebs like Nicole Ritchie and believe that having stylish plus size collections would deter this client from purchasing in the store.

Many stores limited or have not removed their plus size segments, but in addition their petite and Misses sections as well. Bloomingdales’ flagship store in Manhattan, recently consolidated it is modern (more economical ) misses collection to a single floor- as it was spread among two and improved the magnitude of it’s YES collection focusing on teenagers.

Another thing to remember is that lines rarely diffuse down. This try to perform a end line and means lines rarely start at the low-priced, budget . Consider the very successful, budget friendly designer lines (Isaac Mizrahi at Target, H&M artists sets, Go International). All of them started off as quite pricey end ranges.

The matter is, according to my friends in the fashion industry, that in order to possess the budget and size discount collections, you’ve got to support the higher end collections. These friends have a list of size lines that failed since they weren’t gone and purchase by plus size fashionistas. By way of instance, DKNY had a superb and size line that was carried at Bloomingdales and Saks, that no longer exists for several reasons, one being that it didn’t sell until it was on sale. Now, I think that is bit one sided because I also know that the stores place $0 advertising dollars behind their size departments (such as they do their own miniature sections ).

So what does this mean for the bargain plus size fashionista? Well…if department stores are not purchasing the collections (for whatever reason), then there is no overstock or leftover pieces from a year to put on sale/clearance, and no bargains to get.  Which is sad since there are some truly fabulous pricey, plus size designers on the market such as Kiyonna, Elena Miro, and Monifc, who must be transported in department stores.

My main advice would be to do what the petite size sisters did when Saks chucked its petite department. When the department obtained reinstated, they moved , and they got arranged, wrote letters and spent their cash.  The latter is the most crucial thing. There is also shops such as Marianne’s, Ashley Stewart, and even Lane Bryant. These are great for budget weekend wear, but maybe not the quality.