It’s slim (and short, wide, tall) pickings
Posted on Tuesday, March 18, 2008
Becky Bien, a Little Rock agent and top seller for Crye-Leike Realtors Inc., can’t walk into a shoe store and quickly find her size. The narrowness of her feet prevents this luxury. Bien wears a size 7 1 / 2 or 8 shoe... in quadruple-A. “I have to mainly order things online,” she says. Of the few shoemakers that cater to Bien, a favorite brand is Vaneli. It’s available at online shoe retailer Zappos. com. “Some places around here sell that brand, but they don’t carry everything,” she says. “It’d be nice if we had more people around here who sold [extra- ] narrow sizes.” Five-foot-9 Sandra Easter, also of Little Rock, found herself having to deal with the double whammy of being tall and plus-size. “I had an epiphany,” she notes, “when I started to gain weight about three years ago... and I had to go in Dillard’s [Park Plaza ] from downstairs to upstairs in Women’s World.” There, she had difficulty finding plus-size fashions she really liked. Most of it was unconstructed — and “I like tailored outfits,” she says.
Weight Watchers and exercise have taken Easter from a size 18 W to a 14 W. But her height — complete with long arms and legs — continues to be an issue when it comes to finding tall-plus clothing, she laments.
Ready-to-wear apparel manufacturers have come a long way in serving customers who fall into hard-to-fit categories... i. e., the plus-size woman, the petite woman, or the big-and-tall man. But some hard-to-fit customers continue to struggle with wardrobe choices, even in stores that ostensibly are set up to serve them.
There’s the gentleman who is big, but is shorter than 5-foot-9. The boy or man whose height may be comparable to Paul Bunyan’s, but whose waist size is comparable to that of The Thin Man. The woman who is tall and plus-size, or who needs “extended” plus sizes. The woman whose 18- or 22-inch calf prevents her from wearing even stretch boots.
For the hard-to-fit and extrahard-to-fit customer, shopping for clothing “is very much like seeking to buy specialty food, gadgets or tools,” says Rita Harvey, fashion maven and owner of recently closed Little Rock boutique Elle. “The marketplace, now armed and dangerous with precise computer history, tends to produce only ‘safe’ inventories. This is much like driving your car with just the rearview mirror, in that you can see where you have been, but not where you can, or could, go.” Nonetheless, providing clothing for the un-average figure is becoming more a necessity than a courtesy for mass-marketers such as Sears and Kmart, says Kathy Huynh, division vice president of design for Sears Holdings. For instance, “the current statistics for the average North American woman is 5-foot-4, wearing a size 12 or 14,” Huynh says. “There are some specialty and mass retailers that do a good job of meeting some of their needs.” Sears, for instance, has a generous variety of plus and petite clothing. “We are also expanding the offering to include the juniors-plus customer,” Huynh says. “Some of our key pant offerings come in multiple inseams.” But she acknowledges that there are hard-to-fit subcategories of people who may fall through the cracks. Just as with missy customers, plus-size customers do not all have the same body type. “It can be quite challenging to try to be everything to every body.” Custom clothing services abound. But there comes a time when the extra-hard-to-fit customer needs something fairly quickly.
SHORT / STOUT MEN For short men, finding clothing can be a challenge; for the short and portly man, finding clothing can be like seeking the Holy Grail.
Steve Greenhaw, owner of Greenhaw’s Fine Men’s Wear in west Little Rock, does everything he can to dress this customer... including a trick commonly found in women’s sportswear. “We use what’s called [suit ] separates, where the suit coats and the suit pants hang separately from each other,” he says. The ability to buy matching suit separates, rather than a nested suit, is helpful for a customer who may wear a size 48-short coat and a 46 long-rise trouser. (Why a long rise ? A portly man might need a long-rise trouser to ensure there’s enough fabric to go from the front to the back, Greenhaw explains. )
The Portly Short sizes on Greenhaw’s racks stop at 48. For those who need a larger size, the store offers made-to-measure clothing with a three-week turnaround; along with “stock single” items with a seven-day turnaround. “If a man has a stock coat size of 50 short and a stock trouser size of a 48 long, we order both those stock sizes and then they come in about 7 days,” Greenhaw says.
There’s also a smattering of online and other storefront retailers that stand ready to help the Portly Short customer. The Boston-based Big Men / Tall Men / Stout Men’s Shop (big men. com ) goes the extra mile to clothe men who are shorter than 5-feet-8, but may need a sport coat in a size 52, pants in a 46 waist or a shirt in a size 20 collar. In addition to carrying shoes in hard-to-find widths — from sizes 6 to 20, AAA to EEEEEE — the retailer offers a large variety of clothing styles in a variety of sizes, from suits to dress and formal wear to athletic wear, military and police wear. In its suits category, selections such as the Business Suit, Executive Suit and Tropical Wool Suit are offered in 36-52 Short; 35-44 Extra Short; and 38-56 Portly Short; as well as Regular and Long sizes. Short Sizes Inc. com (short sizesinc. com ) also offers short men’s sizes that are not readily available, including Extra Short, Portly Short and Portly Extra Short, with a size range of 34 to 50. Filthy Rich Fashions (filthyr ichfashions. com ) provides links to its big and tall men’s department (bigtallmenscloth ing. ecrater. com ), which carries waist sizes up to 60 and shirts with neck sizes ranging from 18 to 20 1 / 2.
PLUS-SIZE GIRLS Just like plus-size women, plus-size girls have their problems finding clothing that not only fits their bodies, but their youthful preferences. Among their problems are clothing that is too long, too tight or both.
Luckily, there’s a handful of department stores with Girls Plus items. Gap and Old Navy carry girls’ plus sizes up to size 16. J. C. Penney has girls 10-18 plus; Sears and Lands’ End have Girls Plus sizes 7-16; Dickies has uniform coordinates up to Girls 21 plus. Macy’s (macys. com ) also offers clothing in girls’ sizes 7-16. Other retailers include Glenview, Ill.-based Jump ’n’ Style Children’s Apparel (jumpnstyle. com ), which caters to girls ages 7-12 who are “between sizes.” Clothing is designed to fit preteens slim to full-size, with junior waist sizes running from 22 to 31.
Again, Sears is among an increasing number of apparel makers and retailers who are striving to serve plus-size teens looking for ultra-trendy clothing. Missphit, a line of hip apparel specifically made to fit curvy girls sizes 1 X to 3 X, can be found at Dillard’s or missphit. com. There’s also B & Lu, which offers “pieces that feel one of a kind, like you just stepped out of a New York or L. A. kitsch boutique” in sizes 14-30. The line can be had at bandlu. com. Torrid (torrid. com ) has “cutting-edge” apparel for girls and young women sizes 12-26, from Apple Bottoms and Baby Phat jeans to strapless dresses to very nonmatronly swimwear.
EXTENDED PLUS SIZES Women over size 28 have a hard time finding clothing even at garden-variety plus-size stores. Catherines Plus Sizes (cathe rines. com ) carries clothing from size 16 W all the way up to size 34 / 5 X. Bigonbatik. com carries sizes 1 X-6 X and a few women’s extended plus sizes 7 X and up. Onestopplus. com offers some items up to 44 W. Avenue stores and Avenue. com includes sizes up to 32. Kmart (kmart. com ) also has a few women’s extended plus sizes.
Other sources include IGiGI (igigi. com ), sizes 14 to 32; Jessica London (jessicalondon. com ), off-price fashions for sizes 14 W to 34 W; and Silhouettes (silhou ettes. com ), whose clothing goes up to 38 W.
ODD SHOE SIZES Those who are very wide, large, small or — like Bien — very narrow of foot are familiar with wearing their feet out wading through “regular” shoe stores in hopes of stumbling upon a shoe that just happens to fit them. Luckily, several online shoe retailers have come on the scene. Zappos. com, Shoebuy. com and Shoemall. com are three retailers that offer thousands of pairs of fashionable shoes for men and women from sizes 3 to 20, widths 4 A to 9 E. Search-by-size and search-by-width features, and free shipping both ways, make these sites especially valuable. Dillard’s, which also carries shoes in special sizes, periodically hosts events for wearers of these sizes. Nordstrom (nordstrom. com ), which was founded as a small, downtown-Seattle shoe store, carries women’s shoes up to size 15 and has extensive wide / narrow width offerings. Its Web site also has search-by-size capability. Men’s sizes go up to 17. And size-11-shoe-wearing Kathryn Kerrigan has a Web site, Kathrynkerri gan. com, featuring higher-end shoes for women who wear sizes 8 to 14.
TALLS Five-foot-10 Camie Boggess of North Little Rock and Heber Springs prefers longer jackets... 32 to 34 inches long at a minimum. Unfortunately, these jackets are hard to find. And the longer jackets that are out there are not necessarily well made, she adds, because many readyto-wear apparel manufacturers think that it’s OK to just add fabric onto a shorter jacket.
“I guess we’re not a large segment or a vocal-enough segment of the population,” she says “In reality, I need the reverse of what a petite needs. That’s a totally different-proportioned piece.” So Boggess bypasses regular apparel shopping altogether. “The vast majority of my clothes are bought at trunk shows,” she says. She also praises Forsythe’s, a Little Rock boutique, for finding longer jackets for her during seasons when longer jackets are not necessarily the “in” thing.
But tall customers who are especially slender or full-figured find that their search for any piece of clothing is more difficult. Men and boys who are tall and very slim can have trouble finding clothes even in the big-and-tall men’s stores. But several retailers offer options, including Buckle (Buckle. com ), Rochester (Rochesterclothing. com ), Dahle’s Big & Tall Superstores (dahles. com ) and Big & Tall Factory Direct (btdirect. com ). Buckle’s BKE Tyler Jean, for instance, goes down to a 26-inch waist and up to a 38-inch inseam.
And what about a very tall (6 feet or more ) woman who needs clothing in size 18 W or larger ? Few ready-to-wear choices exist. Among those choices is Tall Etc. (tallwomen. com ), which has among its inventory pants up to size 20 and a 37-inch inseam, and several 39-inch skirts that go up to size 22. The British site Tal landall. com has skirts, pants, jackets and tops that run up to women’s size 20; skirts are offered up to 50 inches in length, and pants go up to a 40-inch inseam.
WIDE / NARROW CALVES Among those who have the hardest time finding apparel to fit are people with wide or narrow calves who want to wear knee-length boots. A woman with “athletic” calves measuring 18 inches or more will have trouble wearing even the boots that claim to be for wide calves. Again, help is available. The United Kingdom-based Duo (duoboots. com ) sells to those with wide and narrow calves, as does Zappos. com. Women’s Wide Calf Boots (womenswide-calf-boots. com ), offers “fashion-forward” styles by such shoemakers as Naturalizer, Blondo and Stride Rite, with calf widths up to 22 inches and sizes up to 13 double-wide. Ayla boots (aylaboots. com ) also offers leather boots for wide feet and calves up to 18 inches, using U. S. retail partners with links on the Ayla site. And women with calf circumferences up to 20 inches will find tall boots to fit them at catalog / online retailers Silhouettes and Roamans (roamans. com ).
The needs of the hard-to-fit are not going away. As the population ages — and continues to work, rather than retire — the need for plus-size career wear, in particular, is increasing, Huynh says.
“[These ] customers are more savvy now and demand a lot more than just an oversized Tshirt,” she emphasizes. “They want to look like their missy friends and want the same kinds of clothing with the same attention to style.” The same that goes for all customers who have never been able to wear clothing that is referred to so vaguely as “average.”
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