ooh boy i've been summoned! first of all, thank you so much for the kind words, i really appreciate it 🧡
second of all, the fat tax is more complicated than it seems.
for home sewists, especially hobby sewists, increased fabric costs DO matter more than for businesses that work with a factory. especially for things like wedding gowns that often use fancy fabrics and laces that require a lot of hand embellishments or are entirely handmade.
but let's use the example of twice the fabric: for a smaller size, let's assume we're using 3 yards of simple fabric for $10 per yard. let's add another $5 for thread and fixings. and let's say it's a relatively simple skirt that takes 5 hours to sew. to keep things simple, this sewist charges $15/hr for labor. so your cost is (3x10) + 5 + (5x15), or $110. multiply that by 2.5 to charge customers at wholesale cost, that's $275.
now for a "double the size" plus size garment, we're using 6 yards and spending $10 on fixings (which don't exactly double in real life, it's more complicated than that). labor time remains the same. so we have (6x10) + 10 + (5x15), or $145. then for wholesale cost that becomes $362.5
you can see here that while the initial costs to the sewist only differ by $35, thanks to the way typical wholesale is calculated, there is now a difference of $87.5. so what does the home sewist do? do they charge normal wholesale, do they calculate their "normal" price for a smaller garment and just tack the additional $35 on at the end instead of charging wholesale on it, do they try to average costs between sizes, or do they entirely eat the additional cost?
i don't know! i'm not a home sewist. but this is a very abridged version of real home sewist math.
now let's get into fat clothes math with manufacturing! i've worked with a few factories at varying operating sizes and they do not all operate the same, but in general there are two major processes i've seen for how garments get made/charged for when working with a factory:
first, when making sublimated garments (like my printed polyester skirts), you get a design minimum. that means you HAVE to order a set amount of garments in a particular design and garment style, regardless of size. this is because instead of printing a large roll of fabric, the factory is custom printing every individual garment.
working in this style, the difference in cost between my smallest and largest sizes has, at most, been like $1. i charge wholesale costs (2.5 x cost) for my clothes and frankly i would rather eat the extra $2.50 than make my customers feel shitty about themselves. i'm sure there are many people with MBAs who would laugh at me for this decision but my peace of mind and ethics cost more than $2.50 per skirt. except i'm not eating $2.50 because even tho that's how business math works, that is not a real cost. at most i am eating $1 per garment.
an addendum, but with this sort of sublimation, especially with smaller factories, there can be an additional hurdle for plus sizes: the literal actual width of the fabric printer. depending on how much fabric a garment uses (and our skirts use a LOT of fabric), there will come a time when the garment will get Too Big to fit right side up on the fabric and will have to be rotated, often completely sideways. and sometimes even then, especially for longer garments, there may be not way to make the garment fit on the fabric At All. you can move up to a bigger fabric printer, but then that little factory either has to outsource to an outside factory (which will then charge the original factory more than cost because they need to make money too) or they have to buy new equipment or find ways to modify the garment, which then cause it to not look the same on straight and plus sizes.
the second style of garment manufacturing gives you a set amount of fabric you have to consume per fabric type. this is what happens for roll printed fabric, dyed fabric, or textiles like plaid. the factory will create or buy a certain yardage for a particular fabric and you have to use all of it, minus what they set aside to fix errors. for us, that minimum is 600 yards. so for instance, my cozy sets use 2 fabric colors. i have to use 600 yards of each color. for my cotton collections, we roll print 600 yards of a single design and then split that yardage up into dresses, skirts, and shirts.
now here's where sizing math and the fat tax get fun and funky! see, in this situation, making plus sizes saves you money. even if i am required to use those 600 yards, i am not required to make any set amount of garments. but i am still charged by the piece! so let's say i take those 600 yards of cotton and i make 300 shirts, all in smaller sizes. lets say i am charged $40 per shirt. that's $12,000. but wait! let's say i use 300 yards of that fabric to make plus sizes. assuming double the fabric consumption (which isn't exactly correct), i am now making 150 straight size shirts and 75 plus size shirts, for a total of 225 shirts. let's be extremely generous and say the factory charges me an additional $1 for a plus size shirt (the reality is literal pennies). that's 40x150 ($6000) for the straight size shirts and 41x75 ($3075) for the plus size shirts, for a total of $9075.
you can see in these two manufacturing examples that the increased fabric cost is basically negligible or actually helps to decrease the cost of a production order.
in my mind, the fat tax really boils down to two main things:
for home sewists, they are buying fabric that was created by a factory and then sold to a shop at a wholesale cost, which then marked up the fabric price for sale to consumers. they are paying for products that have already been marked up MINIMUM twice, assuming the factory sells directly to the retailer and not to a brand that THEN sells to a retailer. the fewer materials you use, the more expensive they are proportionally. a factory that makes their own fabric basically charges their customers cost + labor + their markup and they are making fabric in such bulk that the difference between 3 yards and 6 is basically negligible. at least for me using ethical labor, my largest expense will always be labor.
for larger retailers, the fat tax comes from corporate greed, from charging for that extra (at most) $1, and also from a "lost sales" perspective. if you've been paying attention, you've already seen the issue with decreasing production cost by including plus sizes and therefor making fewer garments: decreasing the over all number of garments you make also decreases the potential profit you can make. those 300 straight size shirts costs $12k, but sold at a wholesale margin, they can generate up to $30k in sales, or $18k in profit. conversely, the $9075 order can only generate a potential $22,687.5 in sales, or $13,612.5 in profit. that is, unless you make the plus size clothing cost more to even out the perceived "loss."
this post is very long and it is way past my bedtime but i hope y'all find this interesting and informative. making and selling things is weird!
i think the heart of the emotional issue of the fat tax is fatness being seen as a deviation from the norm when, in fact, it is often the norm. fat people are often an after thought, if we are thought of at all. so it's easy seeing a major retailer charge more for plus sizes and an indie designer similarly charging more and think they're doing the same thing for the same reasons, when what's going on underneath is vastly different.
