Letters: Tantalizing and tailor-made
How fun to read about little Hollywood scandals in the first person [“The ‘Sabrina’ Mystery,” Oct. 24]. I hope you’ll have further excerpts from Mr. Dorleac’s forthcoming book, or maybe a column about costume design.
Deborah Neikirk
Hollywood Hills
Limited sizes, limited customers
Your article [“Kept Out of the Club,” Oct. 24] made me angry. Since when is a 10 considered obese? The average woman wears a 10/12. The fashion industry needs to get it. If a store only has smaller sizes they are losing a lot of business. They deserve it. Shame on them for encouraging eating disorders and other atrocities. The industry should be held accountable.
From a healthy 5-feet, 10-inch size 10.
Kim Jones
Denver
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The article on plus-size fashions and the lack thereof was very informative. However, it left out any mention of men’s clothes. In Los Angeles I can only find two places to buy large-size clothes: JCPenney in Northridge and the chain Casual Male XL. JCPenney sells a very limited stock of low- to middle-end sports clothes. Casual Male sells low- to middle-end sports clothes and business wear in smallish stores. Most of the clothes are polyester, often in strange, almost unidentifiable colors that most people would consider in bad taste. So, my question is, since so many men in this country are overweight, why don’t stores like Macy’s sell high-end clothes for the big and tall? We haven’t lost our sense of taste when we got fat, and we’ve got money to spend like anyone else. Short of having clothes tailored, which is prohibitively expensive, it’s near impossible for big and/or tall men to find tasteful, good-quality clothing.
Michael Scheff
Reseda
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Although I am not plus-sized by any standard, I, too, do not fit the mold. I am 5 foot, 5 inches, and weigh around 125 pounds. Yet no amount of dieting and exercise will make my shoulders any broader, my arms and legs any longer, nor my body any less round. I am not built like a 9, a celery stick nor any other “ideal.” Therefore, if I want any semblance of fashionable clothes, I have to spend hours and large amounts of money to have my clothes altered. And, because of all this — and exactly as your article stated — I used to feel like a second-class citizen. That there had to be something wrong with me because I didn’t fit into the clothes.
Thank goodness I had a mother who disabused me of that feeling at quite a young age. But it’s still hard to look at all the stick models — or plus-sized models — in the magazines, on TV and in the movies, and really not fit either category. I think the majority of women in the U.S. are like me. Our bodies are what they are and it’s not easy to find clothes that fit right off the rack. We are the “norm.”
And yet we are like sheep — we go along with the gospel that it’s us who are wrong, not the manufacturers.
Good luck in getting that changed!
Missy Alpern
Los Angeles
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I was hoping for a more enlightened article regarding plus-sized fashion, yet I got another article where the fashion industry is justifying itself for not sizing clothes larger than a 10, hardly plus size. I’ll tell you why only 17% of sales in the fashion industry are from plus-size fashions: The clothes are tents and ugly for anything larger than a 10. When I was a smaller size, the clothes were fantastic and I loved shopping. I now spend on purses and shoes. I can only wish for decent fashion at a 14 — a large size, but hardly tent-worthy. When will the fashion industry wake up and realize there are legions of women starving for good fashion?
Marta C. Allen
Hermosa Beach
