Melissa McCarthy has been making a lot of waves recently. She’s cemented her place as one of the finest comedic talents of our time, and she’s a vocal proponent of body positivity. Now she’s setting her sights on the fashion world with her own fashion lineup for the already-existing line called Seven7. In a recent interview with Refinery29, she voiced her opinion on how the plus size category can be othering and promotes a kind of segregation for women in stores.
“Women come in all sizes,” she explained. “Seventy percent of women in the United States are a size 14 or above, and that’s technically ‘plus-size,’ so you’re taking your biggest category of people and telling them, ‘You’re not really worthy.’ I find that very strange.” It doesn’t make a whole lot of sense business-wise, she goes on to point out. You’re taking 70% of an entire population and isolating them, telling them that nice clothes just aren’t for you.
There’s nothing inherently wrong with the words “plus size,” it’s a matter of how that entire section gets treated in a store. As anyone who’s been in a department store or shopped before can tell you, it’s a section that’s often just tucked in a corner out of the way.
Personally speaking, as someone who’s had a devil of a time navigating the fine world of women’s sizing after spending 25 years dealing with the fairly straightforward men’s section, clothes shopping is a terrifying prospect. Your size can change from retailer to retailer, often from manufacturer to manufacturer. You could be three to four different sizes in the same store alone. How does that make any kind of sense?
McCarthy’s fashion line hopes to eliminate a lot of that confusion. She’s making sure that the stores carrying her label are sticking to the sizes she’s created. “I said, ‘Run the sizes as I make them and let friends go shopping with their friends. Stop segregating women.’ And they said, ‘Okay.’”
You can expect her clothing line for Seven7 to hit Nordstrom, Macy’s, HSN, Bloomingdale’s, Lane Bryant, and Evans this month.
(via TIME)
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