Beyonce’s Ivy Park fashion line is missing plus sizes

Lizzie O'Leary Apr 22, 2016
HTML EMBED:
COPY
Shoppers check out Beyonce's Ivy Park collection at TopShop in London. Stuart C. Wilson/Getty Images

Beyonce’s Ivy Park fashion line is missing plus sizes

Lizzie O'Leary Apr 22, 2016
Shoppers check out Beyonce's Ivy Park collection at TopShop in London. Stuart C. Wilson/Getty Images
HTML EMBED:
COPY

Beyonce recently added fashion line Ivy Park to her massive business empire. Along with other investments, like management company Parkwood Entertainment, Forbes puts her net worth at $250 million.

Ivy Park is her foray into the rapidly growing athleisure market. Like most things Beyonce, it’s already raking in the money, but as the Root’s Danielle Belton tells us, the fashion line doesn’t exactly have everything:

Fashion is about fantasy. They’re selling aspirational, overpriced dreams in size 4 pants. They are selling an aesthetic, a brand identity that people can buy into.

From Lululemon to Givenchy, it’s about that “it” factor, that coolness, that status. And to the fashion industry, nothing says “status” like thinness. Which means that what it’s not doing is selling to the plus-size market — one of the largest-growing markets, at $17.5 billion, and the most underserved market — because to the fashion industry, fat people are like “the dead Macy’s in the dying mall” of clientele: Nobody in the industry wants to go there because selling clothes to the average woman is not cool.

Click play above to hear more from this interview.

There’s a lot happening in the world.  Through it all, Marketplace is here for you. 

You rely on Marketplace to break down the world’s events and tell you how it affects you in a fact-based, approachable way. We rely on your financial support to keep making that possible. 

Your donation today powers the independent journalism that you rely on. For just $5/month, you can help sustain Marketplace so we can keep reporting on the things that matter to you.