Here on the SDMB, and all around the Web, I’ve seen frequent accusations that the diet industry – companies promoting weight-loss programs, foods, services, and so on – are in cahoots with the fashion industry. It’s a grand conspiracy; the fashion industry instill overweight women with low self-esteem by parading thin models through fashion magazines and making attractive clothing in larger sizes unavailable, thus driving them to enroll in weight loss programs, and buy exercise equipment, special diets, and self-help books. I don’t know how the fashion industry would benefit from the deal – maybe kickbacks from the diet industry, which generates more revenue than just selling attractive plus-sized clothing – but something’s got to be in it for them for such a conspiracy to work, right?
So, has there ever been evidence of the fashion industry working hand-in-hand with the diet industry, with the end goal of selling more weight loss services and products? How would the fashion industry benefit from this?
I think it’s a lot simpler than conspiracies or kickbacks with the weight-loss industry. Simply put, the fashion industry makes money when people are dissatisfied with their clothes and decide to buy new ones. If they sell you clothes that you really love, clothes that are useful and comfortable and attractive and flattering and that you want to keep wearing indefinitely instead of replacing them with new clothes, they have failed.
This is why the industry focuses so intensely on transient styles and modes—if they can get you to buy clothing with an “expiration date”, so to speak, after which you won’t want to wear it simply because it looks too “last year”, then they win. So being in style and up-to-date is stressed as very very very important.
Similarly, if they can sell you clothes that aren’t really all that becoming to you and don’t make you look that good, whose only real appeal is that they’re up-to-date and trendy, then you’ll be more receptive to the next new trend.
Tall slender women are the best models for most types of clothes: their height and slimness show the lines and shape of the garments to the best advantage. So tall thin models make the current fashions look appealing, so you’ll want to buy them. And since the clothes were designed for the tall thin model instead of average you, they won’t look so good on you that you’ll fall in love with them and want to keep wearing them after they go out of style. There you go: win-win.
I’d say that the interaction of the fashion and diet industries is more of a natural symbiosis than a “grand conspiracy” of any kind. Wanting to look good in clothes designed for thin women inspires you to diet; changing sizes as a result of success (or failure) in dieting inspires you to buy new clothes; and so on. It all works out very mutually advantageously without anybody having to do any actual conspiring.
I am not sure there is a GQ answer to this but I think making a claim of some grand conspiracy for these sorts of things (e.g. a homosexual conspiracy to turn all our kids into homosexuals) is absurd. The effort required to pull off such a conspiracy not to mention the fallout if such a conspiracy were uncovered makes it extremely unlikely in my mind that they are all in cahoots.
Bottom line is these businesses are in business to make money. Why a clothes manufacturer would ignore making large sized clothes is beyond me when so many of the population os overweight…there is a lot of money to be made there. That said they may not make “pretty” clothes for overweight people because many such things (short skirts or low cut or form fitting blouses for women for example) simply do not look good on overweight people. Further, overweight people may have a lower self esteem and avoid buying “pretty” clothes. I have no doubt if there were a market for x-large sized pretty clothes someone would fill it.
As for the diet industry they make fortunes out of telling people they are fat and parading beauty ideals in front of us. Further, they know most people are fat because they are too busy and/or too lazy to do what we have all known is the road to weight loss…watch your diet and exercise (barring a very few people with a medical condition that makes them fat). So a quick fix sells well.
I know many overweight people gripe about the media holding forth nearly unreachable ideals of beauty before us and complain about how it makes them feel bad. But it seems a chicken and egg thing. Do people define beauty ideals and the media follows them or do the media define the ideals and people follow them? It is probably a feedback loop and where it “starts” is impossible to say. Different societies have different definitions of beauty (I remember seeing some African nation where women put padding in their skirts to have huge asses because big butts are beautiful there).
So, either our society learns to define fat as beautiful or this will be an ongoing issue but not a conspiracy.
I know nothing about the diet industry but a bit about the fashion industry. And here’s what I know: the fashion industry is there to sell clothing, however they can. Designers will custom-tailor high-end clothing for whatever size woman or man who has the bucks to pay for it and will make them look good. Some ready-to-wear lines do pretty much self-select for the thinner person (Juicy Couture for instance). There is no conspiracy, though. If some people are too fat to fit in their clothes they don’t care as long as there is someone to buy the clothes. And clothing designed for larger people is also part of the fashion industry. They don’t particularly want to lose their market.
I once interviewed a fashion designer doing a show in Denver, on-site in a high-end clothing store. During the course of my interview his line was being modeled by a gorgeous girl approximately 6 feet tall who weighed maybe 110 pounds, and it looked fabulous. But a customer came in for a fitting, and she was getting fitted for the same suit the model was wearing. The woman was middle-aged (I should note here that I was about 30 at the time so I considered her old–but I’m now thinking she was in her early 50s). She was the antithesis of the model, short, dumpy, chubby and I thought, “Good luck.” But. When she came out in the suit she looked–well, okay, she didn’t look like the model. She did look about 40 pounds lighter, 20 years younger, etc. I mean it was a huge improvement.
This was for what the designer called a “mid-range” suit, meaning the price. It was $700 (in the mid-1980s) which I considered extreme, but when I saw what it did for the customer I figured it was worth it, and hoped that by the time I got to be middle-aged, dumpy, and chunky, I could afford such an indulgence. PS–I can’t.