No, Of Course Brands Shouldn't Charge More For Plus Size Clothing

Today, Vogue Business posted an article about whether brands should charge more for items in larger sizes. How is this still a question?

Apparently, though this is unfair and pretty blatantly fatphobic, some brands are charging customers more for larger sizes, as opposed to straight sizes, with price differences ranging from $10 to $100. Vogue Business listed common reasons why brands charge more for larger sizes, including the need for extra fabric and more labor for creating additional patterns or fitting. Even worse, some brands (the article lists Old Navy as one of them) are charging more for just the women's plus sizes, and not the men's. Old Navy says the disproportionate cost is because of "additional costs of developing curve-enhancing looks," which just sounds dumb.

The best thing for brands to do would be to just suck it up and shell out the extra cost per piece, which would likely be minuscule given how it would open up their offerings to a bigger customer base. Absorbing that cost won't break the back of an already major retailer or brand, because it didn't for newer brands like Good American and 11 Honoré, the latter of which absorbs the higher wholesale costs that about 15 percent of the brands it carries charge for larger clothes.

Developing a new market and finding out what said market wants out of their clothing will, of course, cost these brands money up-front, but, in the end, they would be making their clothing available to the 200 million Americans who wear a size 12 or above, who currently don't have enough options on the market and deserve affordable clothes, too. Emma Grede, Good American's co-founder and chief executive, sums it all up in one rhetorical question, asking, "Is it fair to charge the size 18 more because you only just started thinking about it?" The answer is no.