What Happened to Andrae?
Okay, why did none of you tell me about this? Because I think it's been out there for a while. Torrid (yes, that Torrid, the Curvy Girl Store to end all Curvy Girl Stores) has an interview up on their website with none other than Andrae Gonzalo from Project Runway!
"Some of my commissions are women that are plus size, and it's a really new territory for me. I don't have a mannequin that's the right size... Coming over here I was thinking, because a plus size body is shaped different than a non-plus size body, it should also liberate you in terms of design. I think all through the history of fashion we've been augmenting [straight] sizes so they fit plus sizes. I've never seen someone approach it from square one, like, that this is the shape, and then just work around clothing that shape. That, actually, really fascinates me and would be something that I would love to explore in terms of a line."
And:
" I think one of the biggest mistakes [in designing plus-sized clothing] is probably hiding. Some of the most unattractive clothes are the ones that are designed to obscure the body... It's when the clothes are sort of pretend or make believe that a plus size woman is not a plus size. Any sort of self-hatred that goes into the design, that's a mistake. "
How is it possible that I now love Andrae even more? Seriously, to have a designer of Andrae's caliber designing specifically for the plus-size body... it wouldn't be an ugly mermaid dress, that's for sure. I love Andrae.
"Some of my commissions are women that are plus size, and it's a really new territory for me. I don't have a mannequin that's the right size... Coming over here I was thinking, because a plus size body is shaped different than a non-plus size body, it should also liberate you in terms of design. I think all through the history of fashion we've been augmenting [straight] sizes so they fit plus sizes. I've never seen someone approach it from square one, like, that this is the shape, and then just work around clothing that shape. That, actually, really fascinates me and would be something that I would love to explore in terms of a line."
And:
" I think one of the biggest mistakes [in designing plus-sized clothing] is probably hiding. Some of the most unattractive clothes are the ones that are designed to obscure the body... It's when the clothes are sort of pretend or make believe that a plus size woman is not a plus size. Any sort of self-hatred that goes into the design, that's a mistake. "
How is it possible that I now love Andrae even more? Seriously, to have a designer of Andrae's caliber designing specifically for the plus-size body... it wouldn't be an ugly mermaid dress, that's for sure. I love Andrae.
posted by mo pie at 10:31 AM
3 Comments:
I love this! I wish I had a good enough fashion imagination to picture what he's talking about. I did have in my size 26+ days, a few things that were honest-to-god big girl designs - things that were flashy and unusual, and needed a bigger, curvier body to look right. Unfortunately, they were always one-of-a-kind deals, and even if I went back to the same store or looked for something by the same designer, I couldn't rely on finding something as good again.
Anyway, I hope this guy will get his hands on Torrid's line, because, as much as I like them, they do tend to just upsize skinny girl clothes a lot of the time, and I really don't like that water balloon look a lot of their tops and dresses have.
His is a thought process we need to see more of, and not just in clothing, etc., but in really appreciating a set of parameters for what it is. For example, I remember reading in Mollie Katzen's cookbooks about Carob. She said it was ridiculous to try to cook with carob as a substitute for chocolate. Its a totally different thing, and when you approached it as the different thing it was, you could make delicious things with it. Same here: instead of approaching a plus size body as simply a thin body with more meat on it, to approach it as a totally different thing altogether will indeed yield great results.
Good ol' thinking outside the box.
I would love it if one of the challenges on Project Runway was to design for plus-sized models. I doubt it will happen though. Even if it did, people would probably make a lot of fat jokes about it on the Internet.
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