Feb. 23 through March 1 marks National Eating Disorder Awareness Week, which promotes awareness of eating disorders and body image issues. A group of students at Cornell University is creating and developing a clothing line that aims to stretch body image consciousness to celebrate all shapes and sizes.

Brandon Wen, a junior fiber science and apparel design major, worked with classmates to create a plus-sized clothing line for a project last year.

“For me, the draw to plus-sized people is their bodies and trying to find what it is I like about them, seeing them as something more objective and artful and less like this is a body and this is what the standard is and this isn’t,” he said.

Wen and Laura Zwanziger, also a junior fiber science and apparel design major, worked with an exchange student to create the line for a class project. Wen and Zwanziger’s “Ruben’s Women” line is named for painter Peter Paul Ruben, a Baroque painter who is famous for his sexual portrayal of fleshy women, Zwanziger said.

Wen and Zwanziger were looking to design clothes to fit precisely to plus-sized bodies. They saw a deficiency in clothing that was available for plus-sized women. Clothing is often designed to fit other sizes and just enlarged for plus-size clothing, Zwanziger said.

Zwanziger cited the statistic that plus-sized women hold 28 percent of the buying power and use only 17 percent. She added that the deficiency in the market exists because markets shift and what’s considered “beautiful” also shifts.

“It means that garments are not there because nobody’s making them and if they’re making them, they’re poorly made or shapeless,” Zwanziger said. “People were really upset because fat sits differently on everybody. The generalizations of plus size meant that you were wearing a sack.  Nobody feels good in that.”

Wen and Zwanziger said the biggest challenge they faced throughout the process was the lack of plus-sized mannequins that were available.  They went through an extensive process to create their own mannequin. Most existing mannequins, Zwanziger said, are created based on the fit of the inside of a woven article of clothing

“That’s why a lot of clothes don’t fit anybody regardless of their size because they’re not designed for a body, they’re designed for the inside of a woven garment,” she said.

While he was designing the line, Wen said he was trying to address the stigma within the industry of plus size being equal to obesity. He said he wanted to promote “people accepting their bodies the way they are.”

He said he is interested in the artistic aspect of designing for plus-sized women, and since Zwanziger has been abroad, Wen has focused on moving the line in this direction and will promote it at the school fashion show in April.

“I want to take it in more of an artistic direction, making the clothing a bit more conceptual, because I know for the project it was more of a product development course,” Wen said. “I am more interested in making an art piece and part of it is deciding what that means for this specific niche because there’s a lack of it in plus-sized clothing.”

Many design schools are “very scared” to design for plus-sized figures because it’s more challenging, Zwanziger said.

“(It’s about) really designing for a body and taking inspiration from a body, as opposed to trying to fit everybody into one standard system because there’s so many bodies out there,” she said. “You can’t say that one’s right and one’s wrong because they’re all different and they all deserve to have choices.”

Published on February 27, 2014 at 1:18 am

Contact: clmoran@syr.edu