Inclusive sizing: Which retail brands are plus-size friendly?

In recent times, labels are claiming to have plus-size ranges in their clothing lines to suit all body types. Flawless.org completed a study to discover how inclusive the biggest online women’s clothing brands are in their sizing.

Urban Outfitters has just 546 dresses available online above a size 14, while Topshop has 3.3 percent of its online items in a size 16 or above, whereas New Look has 353 items out of 7,144 in plus-size.

River Island (5.1 percent) and Boohoo (5.2 percent) have their clothes labelled as plus-size, while River Island has 27 out of their 967 tops available for sizes 18-28 (3 percent), Boohoo has 1,280 out of 8,240 items in the sale section available to plus-size body types (16 percent).

Fast-fashion counterparts such as I Saw it First (6.4 percent), Oh Polly (7.3 percent), Motel Rocks (7.6 percent), Pretty Little Thing (8 percent) and Nasty Gal (10 percent) all have less than one tenth of their products catered towards plus-size customers. Additionally, Missguided have only 962 of their 17,107 items classified as plus-size (5.6 percent), despite having seven dedicated sizes.

Which brands are most inclusive?

54 percent of all of H&M’s women clothing is between XL and 4XL, with 64 percent of their tops available fitting these sizes on its online store.

Although Miss Selfridge’s range only goes up to size 18, 47.7 percent of their items are between the sizes 16-18. Their online store also has a large range of plus-size tops for customers, with 59 percent catered towards size 16-18.

Growing fast-fashion outlet Shein ranks significantly well compared to its competitors with 37.2 percent of online items available from XL to 4XL. The brand ranks considerably in the number of plus-size dresses, with 5,795 plus-size dresses in comparison to 19,536 average dresses available (30 percent).

All data for this study was collected on 30 September.

Plus-size market opportunity

According to Coresight Research, by the end of 2020, the size of the US plus size apparel market will grow to 24 billion dollars, with an annual growth rate of approximately twice the total growth rate of the apparel market, up to 10.9 billion dollars.

Photo credit: Vinted