It's times like this that I think what a pity it is that traditional skills like sewing and dress-making aren't taught to girls anymore. Just think - if you could make your own clothes, you wouldn't have to whine and pule about how utterly awful the available clothes are, would you?

(And don't whine about how impossible that is. I've made my own clothes in the past - BY HAND, no machine. One advantage is style - I can do my own thing. The other is longevity - those items are still with me, some of them over twenty-five years old, precisely BECAUSE they were made by hand and thus are not nearly as flimsy as the stuff sold in stores.)

"Just sew your own clothes?" This is a bigger challenge than just learning how to thread a needle.

1. Unless you are lucky enough to live in a city with a textile district (NY, LA, London, Hong Kong, etc), your fabric choices are limited to what Jo-Ann Fabrics or the Walmart craft department has to offer, since they have squeezed out most of the mom and pop fabric stores. This means, forget any natural fiber *(except for quilting cotton), or any high-quality (read: durable, non-pilling, non-fading, non-oli-slick-glossy) high-quality rayon or poly. But yes to lots of crappy stretch-knit and awful satin.

2. Unless you know how to draft your own patterns, you are limited to what the major pattern catalogues have to offer. Butterick and McCall's (which are practically indistinguishable), Simplicity, and Vogue. Each of these companies have major fit/sizing issues, most of them are decidedly limited in offering anything "plus size", and all of them follow the current fashion trends (and most of them not very well ....)

3. Unless you have a dress form made to your measurements, you are going to need a friend (who understands construction at least as well as you) to help you mark the inevitable alterations needed.

All of this takes time and money. Yes, you can do it, and yes, you can make some pieces you will treasure for years (if you chose the right fabric, the right pattern, and got the construction right), but to create an entire wardrobe this way, without a fashion house behind you, is fantasy.

I don't want to say I can sympathize, because I'm not overweight myself, but I do have quite a few larger friends. And it seems to me that when they talk about how much they hate all the clothes available in their size, what they're really saying is they hate their size itself. It's inherently a lot harder to design clothes that larger people genuinely look good in, and that's something no designer...not even one who totally embraces her own size like Beth Ditto...can change.

Basically there's a reason all fashion models are rail thin...for example, one friend who is 5'9" and I'd guess 32-28-32 can wear absolutely ANYTHING and look great. As a much shorter hourglass, I have maybe half to 2/3 the clothing options she does…I can't wear sack dresses, babydoll tops, boxy jackets, or anything that doesn't fit fairly close to my waist...mainly because it makes me look heavier than I am. The larger and more pear or apple shaped a woman gets, the fewer and fewer options are left, until at some point it's no longer about looking good, just less bad.

Re: the alleged "fat girl uniform"...I went to jr. high in a small poorish Midwestern town where the 80's lingered into the mid-90's, and we ALL wore stretch pants (with stirrups! gahhh!) and long, baggy, gaudy sweaters...I agree, this style needs to stay dead!

Designer Anna Scholz is 6'1" and wears a size 20, so she knows what it's like to be the wearer of larger size clothes, too. She designs clothing for size 12-28.

Designer Olivia Harper makes clothes specifically for women of size. Her things are manufactured in the USA. Don't sweat the price tag, it's what clothing should cost when not made in China by slave labor.

Svoboda jeans are designed for women who fill them out nicely and are a generous size 12 and up.

When customers demand quality, a store will meet the need. I'm not surprised at the stretchy pants, oversized t-shirt market. And it's not limited to fat girls with no taste. Plenty of skinny girls are similarly aflicted.

I am old enough to actually remember the 80s as reality and not just some sort of retro cool, as I imagine Beth Ditto thinks of it. And I agree with the posters here who say that EVERYONE was wearing that slouchy big sweater (hanging off one shoulder) and leggings look. It was a legacy from the movie "Flashdance", I believe. And frankly, it does not look good on anyone who isn't a size 2, LONG LEGGED, very fit dancer -- it is hideously unflattering.

But on the other hand, it is also loose and stretchy (those leggings). So it could accommodate that tiny dancer and her 200 lb friend. In fact, heavyset women clung to this style long, well into the 90s, long after slimmer women had abandoned it. Though I really don't know if it will come back, Ditto or not.

In the last forty years, we have witnessed a somewhat unusual re-occurring fashion motif, of revisting fashions from the past, usually about 30 years later. When I was in junior high (late 60s), there was a BIG revival of the "thirties look", the Bonnie and Clyde thing. My mother and grandmother were horrified anyone would to wear those ghastly old styles. But I thought they were cool! After all, they were so different than the "mod" styles of the 60s that they seemed both quaint and "new".

I imagine it feels just like that to someone as young as Ms. Ditto -- to wear something so quaint and out of style and unfamiliar that to YOU, it seems fresh. And naturally to Kate Harding, who I guess must be in her mid to late 30s, it's not "new" at all, but a nasty flashback to an awkward unflattering era she'd rather forget.

I can tell you, Kate, that there hasn't been any kindness to fat women since maybe the Italian Renaissance, and since about the mid nineteenth century (when industrialization and mass production got started), we have seen the decline and virtual disappearance of custom hand-made clothing. If you were a fat woman in 1850 or before, you could wear anything you liked, including the newest styles...because you had to make it yourself, or the local dressmaker did. There were no sizes, and no concept of being a "2" or a "20". A skilled dressmaker could (and can still, if you can find or afford one) subtly make any style flattering.

Of course, we really can't make our own clothing anymore, even for the tiny number of people who can actually sew. It's partly what someone said about the lack of access to quality fabrics (unless you live in the NYC garment district), and partly because we have unusual modern needs for clothing that is very hard to sew -- performance gear, swim suits, exercise clothing, complex winter coats etc. -- and partly because we can no longer make do with just 3-4 outfits like ordinary people did in the past (in fact, most people were fortunate to have ONE decent set of clothes). You could not hold down a decent job today if you wore the same clothing day after day. We also have incredibly high expectations of being able to launder things constantly; no vintage garment could ever stand up to that.

But back to the trauma of being plus-sized: I believe the problem is NOT having enough clothes for heavyset women. There has never been more of a selection of specialty stores, or wide size ranges in mass market stores (Walmart, Target, etc.), and most of the established designers today have plus lines.

I think the problem is (and was even in the 80s) how fat women FEEL about their bodies and hence, the clothes they package their bodies in. The vast majority of fat women absolutely hate being fat and despise their looks; they are always "just about" to start on a "big diet" which will shrink them down to an ideal size. Therefore, why pay for good quality clothes? They will just get discarded when you "lose the weight".

Most heavyset women I know have several entire wardrobes, in different sizes from wistful pieces saved from 20 years ago (in the hopes that a 40 year old will attain the body she had at 18) to nasty "fat clothes" -- shapeless floral tops and stretch pants in navy, black and brown. Oh they have plenty of actual clothing -- Americans own incredibly vast amounts of clothing by historical standards -- but they are "hate clothes"...things you detest but buy because they are all that fits, or they "cover you up" or they are "OK until I lose the weight".

People who don't love themselves, don't bother to buy clothes they love (let alone SEW them) and don't/won't spend the kind of money required to buy beautiful things of quality. Our culture teaches women, even women of fairly normal size, to constantly critique their bodies, find the tiniest flaws and then hate on themselves. A lifetime of doing this is incalculably exhausting and demoralizing.

And tunics with rhinestones cats on them are honestly the very least of the problem.