Why Don’t Brands Care About Plus Size Kids?

Because we're going to have to make them.

CW: This essay contains links to research, as well as one source quote, that use o-words and other stigmatizing language to discuss weight and kids.

Photo by Michael Hall via Getty Images

Jessica, a mom in upstate New York, braced herself to go swimsuit shopping for her 8-year-old daughter Rose this year. Rose is “about twice the size of many of her peers,” Jessica says, in part due to various medical conditions that require management with medications that cause weight gain. She has outgrown the kids’ sections at Wal-Mart, Target, Old Navy and The Children’s Place. “Their size 16 is too small,” Jessica says. “And it sucks! She’s only eight, dang it. And now instead of buying adorable child-appropriate outfits, I have to choose between juniors and full-on women’s clothing.” Neither are cut right for Rose’s body: Sleeves and legs are too long and necklines are too low. “A shirt that wouldn’t be low-cut on an adult will be open down to her abdomen,” Jessica notes.

But swimsuits turned out to be a special kind of hell. None of the children’s sizes fit at all. Swimsuits in the women’s section were cut so high on the hips that on Rose’s short torso, “they looked like a thong,” Jessica says. “We ended up having to settle for a bikini made for a teenager.” Then Rose called home crying that she wasn’t allowed to swim at a local program that she was attending, because the adults in charge deemed her swimsuit “inappropriate.” So Jessica spent hours combing the mall, finally settling on a too small children’s one-piece that Rose was just able to squeeze into. “We definitely get looks and judgment,” she says. “And summer is the hardest because of ideas about ‘appropriateness.’” 

As many readers know, I’ve been working on this piece for months. But the conversation around plus size kids clothes is way older. During my research, I came across a Forbes Magazine piece called “The Big Market for Big Kids’ Clothes,” describing plus size kids’ clothes as “one of the most promising niche markets in the fashion world.” The piece noted that sales of women’s and girls’ plus-size apparel was a $47 billion industry, accounting for 24 percent of all clothing sales and nearly 40 percent of all women’s and girl’s apparel sales. That article was published in 2010.

And yet. As we approach 2023, plus size kids’ clothes are still no more than an afterthought for most children’s clothing brands. Old Navy, Gap, and Lands’ End offer plus sizing, but not for every item in every size. (As of this writing, Gap Kids, for example, offers roughly 15 pairs of pants in sizes 14, 16 and 18, while stocking over 100 styles in total.¹) Department stores like Target, Wal-Mart, Kohl’s and JC Penney, as well as mall staples like The Children’s Place and Justice, do better although stocking (both online and in stores) can be equally erratic. And the kind of higher end kids brands beloved on Instagram—think Hanna Andersson, Tea Collection, Primary, Boden, Alice & Ames—don’t make plus sizes at all.  In reporting this story, I reached out for interviews with designers or product developers at Land’s End, Target, Justice, Kohl’s, JC Penney and The Children’s Place. Not one brand agreed to talk on the record about this market.  

This is because kids plus sizes are “everybody’s last priority,” as a children’s clothing designer told me off the record last year when I interviewed her for Jeans Science. When she worked for a major department store, this designer was dismayed that the plan to launch a juniors’ plus collection was to stash it out of the way, on a different floor from the rest of the juniors’ section. This will surprise nobody who grew up fat and had to trek over to the Husky or Chubette corners of mall anchor stores. But it is surprising that it’s still this bad, even now, after decades of moral panic about the “childhood ob*sity epidemic.” The latest CDC numbers on kids aged 2 to 19 between 2017 and 2020 find that 12.7 percent of preschoolers, 20.7 percent of elementary school age kids, and 22.2 percent of teenagers have a BMI in the ob*se range. How have children’s apparel brands not noticed that there are plenty of kids in bigger bodies who need to get dressed every day, and who want to wear the same things as their friends? When I interviewed Pamela Luk, founder of the kids plus size athletic wear line Ember & Ace last month, she said, “The short answer is capitalism and anti-fat bias.” 

Today we’re going to get into the long answers. 

Photo by VlarVix via Getty Images

Capitalism and Data Limitations

Here’s how Pamela explained the children’s apparel business model during our podcast conversation: 

Most of the brands that work in kids clothing are large corporations and the focus is always profit first. So you spend money developing a pattern, and then you come up with rules to make bigger sizes for that one pattern, and then you price, and then you go sell. And now people are saying, “you have to make bigger sizes,” and the rules aren’t the same for how you’re going to change the sizes of those patterns. And we don’t want you charging more money because that’s just ridiculous. So here they are and they’re like, “Well, but my whole pricing model and everything that I’ve already invested money in…” right?

The focus is on profit and sell more units [...] it’s cheaper just to get into new markets with that existing pattern and stuff that you have, versus trying to take on this problem.

I discussed the fashion industry’s design process, and the challenges of grading patterns (making your “medium” sample size pattern work for bigger and smaller bodies) extensively in Jeans Science Part 2, so we won’t go back over all of that now. But what you need to understand about kids’ clothing is that all of those issues apply and, until recently, clothing brands didn’t even know how big plus size kid bodies are. 

That’s because before a clothing brand hires a fit model, pattern designers use “body data” to help them figure out what size their fit model should be. This data comes from ASTM International, a company that develops measurements and standards for all sorts of consumer products.² To develop size standards for clothing, they conduct body scans on thousands of people, then compile that data into “standard tables of body measurements” broken down by gender, age and other demographics. Fashion brands buy these data sets directly from ASTM or from a handful of other companies that sell ASTM's body data, often intricately customized for their needs. “When I worked at Adidas, we would want body data on people who do low to medium impact workouts three days a week,” explains Stephanie Thiel, a pattern designer who is now the owner of Rad Patterns. Stephanie has sized her adult clothing patterns up to 4X (“and a real 4X”) from the start, but says that when she began to expand into clothing patterns for kids, she realized that ASTM didn’t collect body data for the kids’ plus size market. “This was five years ago, and I couldn’t even find body data to buy.” 

She did come across a limited set of “Boys Husky” data, as well as measurement for a Girls 6X, which has long been the children’s apparel industry’s one concession to body diversity. “It’s kind of a plus size version of a size 6, but it’s this weird in-between size,” Stephanie says. “It’s a size 7 at a size 6 height.” But it wasn’t until 2019 that ASTM released a standard table of body measurements for plus size girls, covering sizes 4 to 20. Alvanon, one of the companies that sells ASTM data along with their own proprietary research to fashion brands, released their own Extended Size North American Kids standards around the same time. So brands are finally getting access to the body data that forms the foundation of retail pattern design. But they still have to want to invest in it. “Now companies will be asking, okay, what proportion of our market needs these sizes?” Stephanie explains. “Because if it’s only 20 percent of [the kids whose parents shop their brand] it’s absolutely shitty but the majority of brands will say, ‘It’s going to cost us more to make it than we’ll make selling it.’”  

Fit Test Fails

Even brands who are enthusiastic about reaching the plus size kids market must now take this newly available data and go through the lengthy process of fit testing and grading. And that’s before a single garment goes into production. “It takes two or three years for a brand to go from deciding to add a plus size line to getting that into stores,” notes Stephanie. 

And they’ll still get fit wrong a lot of the time. That’s because plus size kids are a diverse group of humans with pretty diverse clothing needs. Before Stephanie was able to access ASTM’s plus size data, she began collecting her own, using her own son (who was 11 at the time and wearing a boys size 16) and the Rad Patterns customer base. “I was able to gather around 300 kids’ measurements, which is not a huge data set but at least gave us a starting point,” she says. One fairly consistent finding was that most parents were trying to find a plus size garment that was approximately two sizes larger in width than whatever height their child happened to match up with. “So if your child is the right height for a size 8, but width-wise needs a size 12, I’m going to make my 8 Plus be a size 8 in length, but take all the horizontal measurements from the size 12 data,” she explains. 

But Stephanie knew that this estimate would automatically leave some kids out—because just like we have small fat, mid-fat, and superfat adults (and a huge range of body diversity within those buckets), we have small fat, mid-fat, and superfat kids. “Not every plus size child is two sizes wider than they are tall,” she notes. “Some kids are one size wider, some kids are three or four sizes wider than they are tall.” Some kids carry their weight in their middles, but aren’t especially big in the legs or shoulders; others have a more equitable distribution of fat. Kids come in a lot of different heights too, of course, which is why some parents of plus size kids have luck buying bigger straight-sized garments (at least until their kids size out of their age group), while others can’t make larger sizes work without a ton of labor-intensive hemming. Then add in puberty, and watch the fit issues increase exponentially. 

In a perfect world, every kids’ size would come in at least three versions of plus: Not just a 6 and 6X, but also 6XX and 6XXX. But multiply that up and down the size line, and you can start to see why brands would balk at that many patterns to grade, that many fit models to hire, that many SKUs to stock in stores. “I don’t want anyone left out,” says Stephanie. “But the big brands are always going to leave someone out. Because it comes down to available capital.” 

Where Anti-Fat Bias Lives

Stephanie is right that it comes down to capital. But as Pamela Luk explains, brands will invest that capital anywhere they see a clear path to profit. If brands don’t know their customers want plus sizes, they have no reason to invest in the infrastructure required to make plus sizes. (Beyond “it would be the right thing to do” and see above re: capitalism.) And here the children’s market is in a different place than the adult plus size market. Because brands that market to adults know that 68 percent of American women wear a size 14 or larger. They still aren’t delivering the clothes we need, for a whole variety of reasons, but: We have reached the stage where most major retail brands are performing an awareness about the plus size consumer. They’re launching new marketing initiatives that don’t deliver, they’re selling me a coat that goes up to 3X and then mysteriously erasing those sizes a few weeks later. It’s not enough. But it is incremental progress. And that’s thanks to years of labor from fat activists, including fat fashion influencers like Mia O’Malley, Marielle Elizabeth and Saucye West, launching social media campaigns, relentlessly tagging brands, and saying as loudly as possible, as often as possible, that we’re here and we want to see our sizes on the rack. 

We’re still in the conception stages of this work with kids’ clothes. That’s partly because 8-year-olds like Rose mostly aren’t on social media, of course. They can’t call out brands or start trending hashtags. But it’s also because parents of kids who wear plus sizes often feel complicated about this fact. “It’s definitely something that we have to start talking about and exploring,” said Pamela Luk when I asked her whether parental ambivalence played a role in the lack of plus size kids clothing. “I do think we all continue to struggle with where anti-fat bias lives.” 

Parents may not speak up about needing better clothing options because they want to protect their kids from the kind of visceral anti-fatness that arrives when you exist in a fat body in any kind of public way, as Emiko Davies experienced just from showing photos of her four-year-old Luna helping to make tiramisu. “The assumption is that I am to blame for how she looks,” she said when she came on the podcast. “And I think that is the problem.” 

“The Assumption is I’m to Blame for How She Looks.”

Pamela, like Emiko, has had to think carefully about how and whether to use her daughter’s experiences (who models on the Ember & Ace website) in a public way. “I’m sensitive to exposing, not only my own daughter, but a lot of kids that are already struggling, to the spotlight,” said Pamela, who is determined to brand Ember & Ace in a way that celebrates bigger kids, rather than stigmatizes them. This is something she, as a fat person, is eminently qualified to do. But major clothing brands, which disproportionately employ straight-sized people, are a lot more likely to get it wrong. 

But if it’s hard to do this advocacy for Pamela and Emiko, who are both determined to love and fight for their kids in bigger bodies, it’s impossible for parents who are determined to change their children’s bodies. “Do parents want to show that their kid is ob*se? I don’t know,” says Pamela Shainhouse, an inclusive fashion specialist who consults with brands on how to market to plus size customers. “Do they want to walk into a store with an ob*se child? I don’t know.” Pamela, to be clear, doesn’t let the brands off the hook for not doing better. “They don’t respect it and they couldn’t give a flying whatever,” she says. “It’s really sad. But if there was a market that people actually believed in, people would go into it.” 

In her exquisite and heart-wrenching new novel Big Girl, Mecca Jamilah Sullivan writes about her protagonist’s mother buying “goal dresses” for both mother and daughter to try to get into by the end of the summer. The dresses never fit; they hang off a bedroom curtain rod for months while the family tiptoes around their silent shame. I heard similar stories when I wrote about how to support kids in bigger bodies and asked Instagram and Twitter followers what their own parents did that helped or hurt. “They said, ‘the truth hurts, no?’ after a salesperson mocked my weight gain when I was around 12,” tweeted Shira Rosenbluth about her parents’ relationship to dressing her larger body. “I wish they had told the salesperson I was fine the way I was and it was unacceptable to talk to me that way.” 

Shira Rose@theshirarose

@v_solesmith They said “the truth hurts, no?” after a salesperson mocked my weight gain when I was around 12. 🙃 I wish they had told the salesperson that I was fine the way I was and that it was unacceptable to talk to me that way.

5:29 PM · Nov 8, 2022

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16 Likes

We do need to advocate for kids when the world treats them so harshly. And sometimes that does look like protecting them from public scrutiny. But we aren’t going to get better plus size clothing options for kids if plus size kids have to stay hidden from view. It’s taken heroic efforts on the part of fat activists and fashion influencers to start to correct the misconception that a fat person can’t dress well or doesn’t deserve basic access to professional and practical clothing options, let alone style. And that work isn’t done. But it’s time to start doing it for and with our kids, too. 

1. Yes, those links will have totally changed by the time you read this.

2. ASTM develops standards for all kinds of consumer products such as face masks, laundry detergent pods, furniture, compostable bags, and many other things. ASTM standards are considered crucially important by manufacturers and they have a ton of influence over what products are produced and what we can buy.