Fashionable Fat Women from the 1890s through the 1920s

[TimeTraveller]

I'm a history buff, and sometimes looking for something else I find unrelated items worth saving. Sometimes what strikes me most is not how much has changed over the centuries, but how little. These items are from about a century ago (ah, I remember them as if they were only yesterday), so the wording is quaint to say the least! Items from the Wayback Machine:


I. The Confident Fat Woman in the 1890s

Philadelphia Record, 1896:

The car was just about full. That is, there were no vacant seats, although a very fat woman, who must have weighed in the neighborhood of 300 pounds, might have squeezed her surplus averdupois together had she been so inclined. At Chestnut Street a man boarded the car, and he was very thin. In fact, he might, at a pinch, have secured a position in a museum as a living skeleton. He looked hard at the fat woman for a few minutes, and when the conductor came in to collect his fare he pointedly remarked: "You evidently don't charge for weight on this line." Before the conductor had time to reply, the fat woman, who had noticed the hard looks cast in her direction, retorted: "No; they don't charge for weight. If they did, they would never have stopped for you!"

II. Fashionable Fat Women in the 1920s

The Retail Clerks International Advocate, January 1923:
("Stylish Stout" must have been the equivalent of "Plus-Size" a century ago.)

The C. E. Conover Co. in connection with their Naiad Ready-to-wear Dress Linings have extended their service and put out a new number recently, known at 41/S as a Stylish Stout number. These are made in sizes 46 to 54 inches bust measure. These new linings are scientifically designed to meet the requirements of the woman with the generously proportioned figure, commonly designated in apparel departments as stylish stouts.

The buyers of women's apparel in your store can give you desirable information regarding the growing popularity of Stylish Stout Ready-to-Wear garments. The Stylish Stout Naiad Dress Linings are approved by Edith M. Burtis, the fashion authority, who fifteen years ago, recognizing the need of a specialized ready-to-wear service for stout women, developed the first organized plan to bring this service to the serious consideration of the manufacturers and the stores.

Later Miss Burtis introduced the first scientifically designed stylish stout apparel to the consumer public by means of lectures and fashion shows.

There is no reason why the larger proportioned women should not enjoy the advantage of buying goods to fit them as well as their more slender sisters and every well equipped store should be prepared to meet the increasing demand for the Naiad Ready-to-Wear Dress Linings in all sizes.

III. Fat Models in the 1910s

"Selling 'Stouts' in the Showroom" (abridged), The New York Times, November 26, 1916:
Team Work on the Part of the Model and the Salesman Often Wins Over the Buyer

"I want large sizes," said an up-to-the minute young buyer of women's garments to a manufacturer of stout sizes.

"Then you wish to see our 'stylish stouts'," replied the chief of the showroom.

After the parade of mannequins was over, the buyer went his way, having ordered a large shipment of garments which would make even the plumpest of his clientele have what every woman of weight yearns for, namely, "lines."

No longer need the damsel or the matron of superfluous adipose tissue feel that she is relegated to the "frump" class. The New York manufacturer has been fighting chivalrously for her favor with shears and needle, and has emerged a winner in the joust. He has given her "lines," and "style," and even a certain sartorial piquancy — hence the buyer's order. The Associated Stout Wear Makers and the manufacturer have made a convenient classification of sizes and measurements for overweight Venuses, Junos and Psyches.

While the buyer was making his selection, only four of the sixteen models, or "manikins," paraded before him wearing the garments, for the rest were not "stylish stout" models. The working models, each in turn, did that peculiar little fox-trot of the showroom, displaying the garments to the best advantage, lifting the hands away from the hips to show the "lines," and now and then smiling in a way that only manikins know how.

Each of the four "stylish stouts" differed in type from her sister manikins and once, when the buyer had rejected a garment worn by Miss P, the salesman had Miss Q try it on a few minutes later and he bought it eagerly. Some garments, of course, look better on some models than on others, but there is, too, an "indefinable something" that counts in a sale; perhaps it is when the garment is true to the type of the wearer, as well as better fitting her shape.

Returning to the technique of the fat woman's garment, the greatest difficulty therewith is the sleeve on the shoulder. It is often too tight just at the end of the levator muscle where she raises her arm. The manufacturer has a remedy. There is a most accommodating dart on the under side of the sleeve, running parallel for a short distance with the seam.

Another point is that it is a great mistake to have a seam start in the centre of the shoulder and extend in an outward curve over the bust, then falling straight to the waist. This is said to cause an appearance of narrow shoulders and overdeveloped bust. Numerous manufacturers have so fashioned their garments this year, and found out to their sorrow that they wouldn't sell to up-to-date and discriminating buyers as readily as those having the seam begin on the shoulder close to the neck, coming straight and narrow down to the bust, gradually narrowing to the waist line. This gives the most desirable appearance in a seat and aids the stout wearer in looking slender — comparatively, that is.

The modern manufacturer of stout women's apparel has left nothing undone, either in making the garment itself or in devising an office system to facilitate his work, to array the plumper woman in garments as becoming and well-fitting for her type as it is possible to produce.

IV. Euphemisms for Fat Fashions in the 1910s

We Need the Business by Joseph E. Austrian, Being the Letters of Philip Citron, Head of the House of Citron, Gumhiner & Co., New York, 1919:
(This is reminiscent of discussions today about which descriptive words are most appropriate: fat, obese, plus-size, full-figured, etc.)

Gaunt told me the stylish stouts manufacturers was likewise getting elevated all the time and he was now bothered to get a better name for his merchandise as "Stylish Stouts" is not high tuned enough any more. His firm offered a prize of $100 to the buyers in the trade for a better name and got over three hundred answers. He had a list he was studying and he let me copy it. The names are:— "Buttercups," "Plumpties," "Obesitymodes," "Generosities," "Big-Builds," "Excessories," "Wellfed-Modes," "Fair-Fat-Forties," "Puff-Pasters," "Portly-Types," "Amplitudes," "Dowagerettes " and "Merry-Go-Rounders." He also told me that a new concern was going to operate a chain of retail stores in New York City to specialize exclusively waists and dresses for stout ladies. All stores will be near subway stations.

V. Commentary about Fat Fashions in the 1910s

"Stylish Stouts" (abridged), Atlantic Monthly, New York, February 1919:
Obesity has come into its own. The corpulent dame now has dresses made to exhibit, not to conceal, her shapeliness.
Her charm is increased rather than diminished by the fact that she is fat.
(This article sounds condescending, but I try to give it a positive spin because it does consider that fat women can be fashionable and desirable.)

The title is not my own; it is the comforting caption that advertises a dress sale, comforting because it perhaps indicates an epochal adjustment of fashion to fact. Is it possible that the stout woman, poor dear, has at last become stylish? May she at last be frankly fat, emancipated from frantic remodelings at the hands of corsetiere and couturiere? The burden of obesity is not in the carrying of its pounds, but in being forced to treat the obvious as if it were surreptitious. What dizzy elation for the fat woman to realize that henceforth she is suffered to be not only frank but fashionable! Dame Fashion is as fertile in the unexpected as Dame Fortune.

The fat woman has been so long accustomed to commiseration that it may be difficult for her to realize her new dignity; we have all pitied her, been sorry for the bursting glove-clasp, the exuberant girth, the sweets desired but denied, the chin whose apparent hauteur was so unjust to the kindly heart beneath it; and above all for that plump palm laid upon our arm with its accompanying tremulous whisper, "Am I as fat as she, or she, or she?"

But now all that evil time is forgotten. The anti-fat nostrum, the recipes for rolling, the panting mountain climb, all the many-doctored advice, all the beauty-parlor pummeling — all this is obsolete, for obesity has come into its own. The corpulent dame now has dresses made to exhibit, not to conceal, her shapeliness; these throng authentic fashion-sheets. She has her own clothes, not the adapted "line" of the lean and lovely sylph. The fat woman is no longer done out of her inheritance by a cruel and carping world. She has become a "stylish stout."

The "stout" is even entering story, not for farcical effect either. There is an increasing number of portly heroines in fiction. The male novelist still averts his eyes a little when he makes one. He leaves his outlines a bit vague, out of deference for past convention; for he knows he is an innovator. Fiction is always far in arrear of popular opinion, but there are a few romancers who are coming abreast of the times in portraiture. Alice of Buried Alive* is a dumpy darling, and her charm is increased rather than diminished by the fact that she is fat.

The day of the fat lady was long in dawning, but at last her freedom and her fashionableness have arrived.

[* Buried Alive: a Tale of These Days (1908) by English author Arnold Bennett. Alice Challice is a short, stout, effervescent and well-to-do young widow.]

VI. Not-So-Fat Models in the 1910s

"A Page of Stylish Stouts", Magazine of Fashion — Spring and Summer 1919, Newcomb-Endicott Company, Detroit, Michigan:
(Thin women modeling fat women's fashions in advertisements? Maybe not much has changed in the past century!)

View attachment Stylish_Stouts_1919.jpg

 

[Tania]

 

[thirtiesgirl]

 

[cherylharrell]

 

[thirtiesgirl]