That Time I Bought 60 Pairs of Jeans. For Science.
Part 3: Why denim is difficult and what straight-size designers just don't get.
ICYMI: Here’s Part 1 on the history of women in trousers, and why we can’t stop believing in the “perfect jeans” myth and Part 2 on fatphobia and the fit industrial complex. And you’ll find the entire series here.
Jeans Science Log
Sunday, 10/31/21
Subject 31: Madewell Curvy Skinny, size 16
Subject 32: Madewell 10-inch Roadtrippers, size 16
Subject 33: Madewell 10-inch Roadtrippers, size 18
Madewell is a complicated brand in conversations about jeans, and about plus size jeans, especially. For years, I wore their 10-inch High Rise Skinny jeans in the Danny Tencel Wash, even though my thighs wore holes in them each season. I just accepted that as the cost of doing business (of having my body?) and ordered another pair. In my sepia-toned memories, these were the jeans that never stretched out or cut in. But last year, I sized up from 33 to 34, and these Dannys don’t hold their shape past the first wear. Brands like Madewell reinvent the wheel every season. My body also reinvents itself at regular intervals (pregnant, post-partum, pandemic). One of us has finally changed too much.
But in the name of Jeans Science—and because this is the brand I cannot quit, in my heart—I order an enormous box of Madewell; one of almost every jean they make in my size. I try Madewell’s Curvy Skinny style and decide the legs are too baggy to be a Formal Jean, but they have “wear cuffed with sneakers” potential. Then I try a pair of Roadtrippers, which look amazing at first try-on, but even my thin best friend says her pair stretches out too fast. Working on that knowledge I start in the 16s, which look great but leave red marks on my waist. After a few hours, when the knees are bagging but the waist hasn’t stretched a smidge, I switch to the 18s. That waist stretches immediately. These are all returns.
Before I started Jeans Science, I thought of how pants fit as a static concept: The designers work out their measurements, fabric is cut to match those measurements, said fabric gets sewn together, and that is the size that the garment stays. I did know that clothes can shrink in the wash and that jeans are especially prone to this. In fact, some not insignificant part of my brain has long been devoted to timing the wash cycle of my jeans to my various weekly needs to wear them in public. But jeans actually change size far more often than that. Denim is perhaps less fabric than a living, evolving substance; it stretches and breathes with us and also against us. Your Monday jeans are not your Tuesday jeans, and your morning jeans are not your afternoon jeans.
How and when your jeans change size has to do with what kind of denim they’re made from. A denim formulated with too much cotton is rigid to the point of being painful, like wearing pants made of cardboard. These jeans don’t stretch so much as they stand firm and then collapse, gasping and sagging out in random spots when they just can’t hold on anymore. Alternatively, when a denim is made with too much elastic, it becomes so stretchy that it ceases to feel or wear like denim at all. Some super stretch styles I’ve tried felt more like Lycra that has been skim-coated with the texture of real denim, the way that popcorn texture got sprayed onto ceilings in the 1970s. And the problem with stretch is, it stretches. Often, way too much. Cheaper stretch denim lacks what designers call “recovery,” which is why your jeans that fit fine at breakfast are falling down by lunch. “Designers have to adjust their garment measurements to accommodate how rigid or stretchy the fabric is,” explains Kyeshia Jaume, a senior apparel designer for Forever21. “And dye also really affects fit. You can try on the same style of jeans in the same size, and the darker wash will usually be more snug.”
The amorphous nature of denim is a universal problem for jeans, but it’s also a particular problem for plus size jeans. As one reader noted in the discussion of Part 1, “when I sit down, I expand all sorts of ways.” Everyone does, to some extent—but thin bodies don’t as much as fat bodies. Fat bodies may need different levels of both stretch and recovery from denim, as well as the differences in pattern grading and fit we discussed last time. These needs are not failings of fat bodies. It’s a failing of denim and of the people who make jeans to not recognize and design for body diversity. “The straight-sized women who are the designers for these jeans just don’t think about these things,” notes Jaume.
Even when they do, the economics of fashion disrupts the process. When I tell Maggie McGrath, a design consultant based in Oxford, England and a former knitwear designer for The Gap, all the ways the jeans are failing me right now, she’s not surprised. “You want that really nice, beefy, quality denim like we had in the 90s1,” she explains. “But you can’t get it. Most of the denim on the market is getting thinner and thinner because the cost of raw materials is going up so much in China.” When the cost of materials rises, it influences the full retail price, as well as how much a brand can mark it down on sale and still make money. Consumers are used to major sales now, especially from big brands; we’ve been trained to never pay retail, to wait patiently for J. Crew or Gap to announce a discount because they always do. Brands have to cut costs to deliver that discount, which isn’t really a discount so much as a foregone conclusion. As a result, quality is regularly sacrificed to maintain profit margins. Denim brands perpetually renegotiate deals with fabric suppliers, and often, a pair of jeans that was designed based on the specifications of one material might be manufactured in an entirely different one. “You just have to accept that it’s wrong because you don’t want to lose an order,” says Mallorie Dunn, who designed for several brands before launching her own label, the made-to-order fashion brand SmartGlamour. “There are so many levels where the success of a design can and does break down when it’s manufactured at that scale.”
Jeans Science Log
Monday, 12/20/21
Subject 58: Gap High Rise True Skinny Jean, Size 34
I remember that good beefy denim of the 1990s; I remember it being thick, yet supple enough that I could French roll the cuffs of my slouchy, straight leg Gap jeans. I haven’t bought Gap jeans for years, after eschewing them in the mid-2000s when “premium denim” became a marketing trap we fell into. But I am surprised, after trying so many jeans that cost $100 or more and feel like they’re made of Kleenex, at how very substantial the Gap jeans are, purchased for 40 percent off their initial retail of $69.95. This, I now know, is the result of tremendous purchasing power. Gap sells so many jeans, they can afford to buy nice denim and sell it for not quite Old Navy prices but darn close in a good weekend sale.
And yet. The rise is wrong. The skinny jeans feel tight going on, but within an hour, the crotch starts to drop. I am thinking about them constantly, adjusting them every time I change position. The nice denim didn’t save me and I’m not surprised. I wear the second largest size that Gap makes. I am not the consumer they have in mind.
The impact of globalization and economics on garment quality goes beyond just jeans, of course. So it’s now time to wrestle with the perpetual mystery of plus size fashion: We know retail is in trouble, that dozens of brands have filed for bankruptcy or are otherwise struggling, especially since the pandemic began. We also know fat people not only exist, but make up the majority of clothes-buying Americans. So, why don’t these brands want our money? Why not invest in making jeans that fit people with bigger butts and bellies? Why not include a fat, apple-shaped 40-something mom among your Victoria’s Secret fit models when we know that moms control 85 percent of our household’s purchases and have a collective buying power of $2.4 trillion?
You know the answer is anti-fat bias. But it’s not just bitchy fashion people horrified at the idea of us ruining the lines of their clothes. I mean, it definitely is some of that. This is the industry that made Karl Lagerfeld its king. Where “fatphobia” means “fear of being a size 6,2” where dieting is beyond normalized, and where powerful male designers want models to be clothes hangers, not human bodies. During a college internship at Seventeen (where I would later work as an editorial assistant), the fashion department, following a directive from on high to use more “real girls” in the magazine, roped me and several other undergrads working for free into a photo shoot. And then they were utterly confused because they had no clothes we could wear. I was a size 10 at the time; I ended up awkwardly holding hands with a very bored professional male model while wearing a too small poncho. Yes, even a garment without any seams didn’t fit. Nobody apologized for not preparing adequately for the shoot. They just sighed or whispered under their breath about how our bodies were making their jobs harder—and then raved about the one skinny intern who looked amazing in a spaghetti strap dress that actually zipped up.
And believe me, my thin privilege as a then-size-10 protected me from so much worse. In our conversation for this Thursday’s Burnt Toast podcast, Jaume tells me about her one of her first jobs in fashion, as a designer who wears a size 4X and usually can’t fit into the clothing she designs. She was working at an activewear company and it was her first time designing women’s apparel after a stint in handbag design. “I was maybe two weeks in, we were sprawled out on the floor going over line sheets,” she says. “And I remember my manager saying, ‘Can I give you a little bit of feedback? I need you to hustle more.’” From then on, Kyeshia says, “I feel like I constantly have to look like I’m busy. Because the stigma is, I’m fat so I must be lazy. I lack urgency.”
So yes, that’s all there, percolating beneath the surface. And what’s even more insidious is how this bias is baked into the fashion industry’s structures and budget priorities in ways that nobody even identifies as fatphobia. Body positivity is trending now. And brands know it and market around their inclusivity. But they use this rhetoric without doing the work. As Aubrey Gordon wrote in a recent Twitter thread, brands like Madewell are “using ‘size inclusivity’ as a way to make thin people feel better about buying [their] products without making those products work for fat people.”
Indeed, all of the thin designers I interviewed for this piece told me they would love to design plus size jeans. They weren’t grossed out by fat bodies (at least, not out loud) and they all said it sounded like an important creative challenge. “Plus is seen now as a growing, under-served business,” says McGrath. “A lot of people would be excited about it.” But by “people” she means designers who currently make straight-sizes and who are themselves mostly on the small end of straight-sized. Designers with thin privilege are much less likely to advocate for the needs of fat consumers because they don’t even know what those needs are. And when brands do add a plus size line, they usually just transfer someone over from their mainstream division. “The fashion industry is primarily in New York and LA and most of that talent pool would have more experience with straight sizing,” McGrath notes. “So few people have plus designing experience. You can’t pull everyone from Lane Bryant.”
McGrath and others in the industry say this lack of specialized talent feeds into why brands don’t invest in plus. But it’s anti-fat bias that fuels this lack of talent. “The fashion industry is still pretty much like a cool girls’ club,” says Jaume. “It’s a popularity contest. I’ve worked in this business for ten years and have only come across two or three other plus size designers.3” Fat designers aren’t getting hired, promoted or given the same opportunities that thin designers are. They aren’t in the fittings and they aren’t in the meetings where fabrics are tested for rigidity, stretch, and bounce back. “Because I’m plus and I’m in these rooms, I can say, ‘hey that’s not going to work, she’s not going to be happy about this,’” Jaume explains. And that knowledge and experience has significant financial value. “That’s what makes the product work.”
Anti-fat bias also leads to plus sizes being poorly photographed for websites and catalogs—sometimes on straight-sized models wearing fat suits. Larger sizes are also stocked far less often in stores, or hidden away in hard-to-find corners. A former department store juniors designer told me that when her brand expanded into plus sizes for juniors, they put the section on an entirely different floor from the rest of the juniors clothing. Because every fat teen wants to slink off to a different department instead of shopping with her friends. “It was so half-assed,” says the designer, who asked not to be named. “I remember thinking, oh my gosh, we could make so much money if we did this right. But it was everybody’s last priority.”
Jaume sees a similar pattern at Forever21: “We don’t get as much floor space in the store as regular Juniors. They can design hundreds of SKUs4 every season and we only get a fraction of those,” she explains. “So we have to be very tactical and decide what’s most important for the plus customer to have, given our limited SKU count. People get mad that they don’t see the same cool styles in plus but we have to pick our battles and go with what we know will sell versus what we’re crossing our fingers might sell.” Jaume and other designers planning plus lines try to balance how much their customers want and need basics (jeans in the best-selling cut, leggings, t-shirts) with how much they want trendier items (jeans in a newer, more experimental cut, body con dresses, rompers). She might split the difference by offering more items, but in fewer colors than the straight sizes. Designers working in straight sizes aren’t faced with such trade-offs. And even if a certain style of jean doesn’t sell well, they don’t have to worry that the brand will stop stocking straight-sized jeans altogether.
But when plus sales tank—which they often do— it’s game over. “As a designer and a consumer, I see this one from both sides,” says Jaume. When brands aren’t investing in fat fashion by hiring the right designers, figuring out fit, making enough styles or marketing effectively, then fat fashion doesn’t sell. “But when the community doesn’t show up, then the brand doesn’t see a return on their investment.” It doesn’t feel like a fair ask —buy the bad plus size clothes so we can maybe convince multi-million dollar brands to make us better ones— but I can understand why Jaume holds her breath and hopes for dollar signs every time a brand does take a tiny step towards inclusivity. The system is rigged against us in so many conscious and unconscious ways. The jeans were never made for our bodies because our bodies have been rendered invisible by the fashion industry. But that doesn’t mean we can’t keep fighting to be seen.
In the next and final installment of Jeans Science, we’ll talk about how to do that. You’ll also get the long-awaited list of all the brands I tried, with reviews, and some hopefully useful strategies for how to buy jeans in this world where none of the jeans are good enough.
It is worth noting that we don’t actually know how well this “good, beefy denim” worked for fat bodies because almost nobody was designing plus size jeans in the 1990s. Other sources felt it lacked enough stretch to work well for larger bodies.
In searching for that meme I also had to learn that Anne Hathaway wore a butt pad to be a size 6 in “Devil Wears Prada” and I’m sorry but now you can never un-know that either.
Jaume pointed to Alexandra Waldman, co-founder of Universal Standard and fashion bloggers Nicolette Mason, Gabi Gregg, and Chastity Garne who were tapped by Target to create their Ava & Viv plus line. Yes, we’ll discuss both of those brands in the next installment of Jeans Science!
SKU stands for “stock keeping unit,” and it’s the number retailers assign individual clothing items to help them track inventory.
I love learning about the science behind denim—mostly because I always thought it was my fault (my body’s fault) that jeans and other clothes don’t fit quite right. I hold so much guilt about my body being larger. I’m working hard to let that burden of guilt go, but, man, it is so deeply ingrained. It is mind blowing to me that it’s not my body, it’s the poor design.
Ah, thanks for confirming my suspicion that brands dabbling in plus have no idea what they're doing. So many times I've been baffled by the fit decisions at brands newly pushing into the space (giant sleeve holes! Literally no space for boobs! Ridiculous distance between leg holes!).
Unfortunately it kinda sounds like we're stuck in a loop: brand covets plus money -> brand makes half-assed plus collection -> plus women recognize it's crappy and don't buy it -> brand goes "plus money is a lie" and pulls/reduces/shoves it all online.