Tim Gunn Calls Out Industry For Ignoring Real Women’s Sizes

Tim Gunn calls out the Fashion Industry for pretending that Size 6 is still the norm, when reality is far closer to Size 16.

The Fashion Industry has undergone seismic level changes in the last 20 years. What was once a closed, insular world predicated on elitism has now become a source of entertainment blogging, with New York Fashion Week treated like just another change to oogle celebrities on the internet, and the clothing put forward as another art form that everyone can enjoy. Like the music and movie industries, the Fashion world has been slow to adapt to the changing landscape, and has only in the last couple of years taken steps to shorten the gap between the time that clothes are shown in the runway and their availability to the market.

Vogue first buying up Style.com and their relentless coverage of the runway scene, and then merging the two together is one step is the Fashion world accepting this is the new norm. As is the condensing of how to find the schedule of shows for the four big cities that make up “Fashion Month” and the live streams of said shows on the same site.

But the elitism still remains. Access to runway photographs is tightly controlled, with larger scale photograph distributors cut out so that industry websites have the lion’s share of proprietary content. And there’s a refusal to consider that those watching at home, and who might be a target audience to consider, should be considered at all.

LONG ISLAND CITY, NY – JULY 12: Project Runway hosts Tim Gunn, Heidi Klum, Nina Garcia, and Zac Posen attend the Project Runway Season 15 Cake-Cutting Celebration on July 12, 2016 in New York City. (Photo by Bryan Bedder/Getty Images for Project Runway)

Which is why it’s so refreshing to see, at the start of this year’s NYFW, Tim Gunn has taken to that old standby, large scale print news, and written an essay calling out the Fashion Industry for this short sighted behavior. Gunn, who has been with Project Runway since it’s debut, has been at the forefront of industry change. The show has done more in it’s decade on the air to bring the fashion world to the mainstream and normalize runway shows as just another form of entertainment. Despite the industry ferociously attempting to keep Project Runway and their contestants out of the fashion mainstream, after a decade, that wall is collapsing, which more PR alumni than ever showing at NYFW this year. And now, Gunn is insisting they acknowledge the audience as well.

Writing in The Washington Post, Gunn takes the fashion elites to task.

"“The average American woman now wears between a size 16 and a size 18, according to new research from Washington State University. There are 100 million plus-size women in America, and, for the past three years, they have increased their spending on clothes faster than their straight-size counterparts. There is money to be made here ($20.4 billion, up 17 percent from 2013). But many designers — dripping with disdain, lacking imagination or simply too cowardly to take a risk — still refuse to make clothes for them.”"

What’s the problem? Sizism.

ROME, ITALY – JULY 07: Kate Hudson and Karl Lagerfeld attend the Fendi Roma 90 Years Anniversary fashion show at Fontana di Trevi on July 7, 2016 in Rome, Italy. (Photo by Vittorio Zunino Celotto/Getty Images for FENDI)

"I’ve spoken to many designers and merchandisers about this. The overwhelming response is, “I’m not interested in her.” Why? “I don’t want her wearing my clothes.” Why? “She won’t look the way that I want her to look.” They say the plus-size woman is complicated, different and difficult, that no two size 16s are alike. Some haven’t bothered to hide their contempt. “No one wants to see curvy women” on the runway, Karl Lagerfeld, head designer of Chanel, said in 2009."

"This a design failure and not a customer issue. Designs need to be reconceived, not just sized up; it’s a matter of adjusting proportions. The textile changes, every seam changes. Done right, our clothing can create an optical illusion that helps us look taller and slimmer. Done wrong, and we look worse than if we were naked."

He goes on to talk about the reality of shopping if one is a Size 14 an up calling it ” a horribly insulting and demoralizing experience.” (He’s not wrong.) “Half the items make the body look larger, with features like ruching, box pleats and shoulder pads. Pastels and large-scale prints and crazy pattern-mixing abound, all guaranteed to make you look infantile or like a float in a parade.” (My wardrobe from when I worked in an office, wearing a size 14-16, is one long testament to this.) But then he does something I thought we would not see happen. He calls out Project Runway itself for contributing to the problem.

This a design failure and not a customer issue.

Let’s not mince words: Season 14 for Project Runway was a disaster. Their habit of casting designers for the drama quotient, mixed with the tightened budgets, one day challenges and genuine abuse they force the designers to go through has finally caught up with them. The breathtaking moments of design that made the show worth watching back in the early seasons was entirely absent the entire season. Challenges like the underwear one, designed to titillate, actually gave the contestants bras to simply decorate with lace rather than risk having the designers have to, you know, design a bra and build one in a 24 hour period where they were not allowed to go away from the cameras and rest, (instead they slept on stage as a “sleepover,” as part of the gimmick.) But the real travesty was the finale, where Ashley Tipton, the “plus sized designer” was given the win, despite the fact that her clothes were outright glued together in places, something that would have disqualified any other designer.

Image via Lifetime.com

Yes, Project Runway wanted to give the win to her because they wanted to be able to say they had done this thing and promote a “plus sized designer.” But at what cost? The best runway show of Season 14 was one that was not even televised to the public, because the show wanted to ensure Ashley’s win. Tim is savage.

"“I’ve never seen such hideous clothes in my life: bare midriffs; skirts over crinoline, which give the clothes, and the wearer, more volume; see-through skirts that reveal panties; pastels, which tend to make the wearer look juvenile; and large-scale floral embellishments that shout “prom.” Her victory reeked of tokenism. One judge told me that she was “voting for the symbol” and that these were clothes for a “certain population.” I said they should be clothes all women want to wear. I wouldn’t dream of letting any woman, whether she’s a size 6 or a 16, wear them. Simply making a nod toward inclusiveness is not enough."

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Gunn does not claim to have an easy solution. He says it’s going to require an entire rethink of an industry married to the idea of “nothing tastes as good as thin feels.” But he sees glimpses of change here and there. Leslie Jones’ on the Ghostbusters‘ red carpet for instance. (Designed, incidentally by ProjRun Season 4 winner Christian Siriano, the most successful of the show’s almuni thus far.) he name checks ModCloth and Eloquii as moving us in the right direction. But for success to truly come, the paradigm must shift. Let’s hope that Gunn has pushed that door open just a few more inches.