This complaint is often seen on This Is Thin Privilege. While it is common sense that something that requires more cloth should cost more, I wanted to see for myself just how much of a difference plus size and regular size clothing are in terms of material, cost and size.



I like to make clothing and I often use patterns to do so. I found this nice shirt from Simplicity online.

On the back of a sewing pattern, you can find the measurements and the fabric required to cut out the pieces for the article of clothing you wish to make. I highlighted the important facts.

I am going to be using the US XL pattern since XL and below are all the same cost in clothing stores and I will be using the US 3X for the plus size pattern. Why am I using the largest size in each category? It requires the most material. A woman who wears an extra small will pay the same price for a shirt as a woman who pays for an extra large. A woman who wears a 1X will pay the same for a woman who wears a 3X.



The pattern requires stretch knit fabric. It sells for $4.99 a yard at Joann Fabrics, a popular sewing supply store in the USA. The XL shirt requires 2 yards of fabric, which will cost $9.98 without tax. The 3X shirt requires 3 yards, which will cost $14.97 without tax. Already you can see a difference in price of materials. A spool of thread will be enough for either shirt, so the price of it does not matter here. If you want to be precise, you could measure the length of everything sewn and divide that by the price of the spool of thread, but that’s a bit complicated.



Even with the price difference, the amount of time required to make a 3X shirt will be considerably longer than an XL shirt. Sewing a lot of material can be unwieldy.



I found a similar shirt at Maurices, a store that caters to both normal sizes and plus sizes. It’s a bit more wrinkly and it’s sleeveless, but it’s close.

Typically, whatever is available in a normal size is available in a plus size. Maurices has a weird sizing system. The shirt pattern for the XL would correspond to a Maurices’ Large, while the 3X pattern would correspond to a Maurices 3 (they do not use X in their plus sizes). Most stores do not work like this. The only reason I use Maurices is because they are one of the few stores that have a specific style of clothing in all sizes.

The normal-sized shirt costs $24.00. The plus-sized one costs $29.00. Since sewing patterns do not even go up to the size of Maurices’ 4 (the largest size possible at that store), I can’t even compare the costs of a 4X shirt to a Maurices’ XXL.

However, we are seeing a price difference of $5.00. Price differences for shirts at Maurices and Cato (a similar store with clothing for XS to 3X in the same styles) range from $2 to $5. I haven’t even considered pants, which I’ll probably do a follow-up on later.

In conclusion, retailers have to put a line between normal size and plus size in order to make money. There is no sense in pricing a shirt at a certain amount for all sizes. Stores make more money off of extra small clothing because it is priced to cover the cost of extra large clothing. Likewise, they make more money off of 0X clothing because it is priced to cover 3X clothing. Is it fair? Maybe not. However, giving each size of clothing a certain price would be inefficient. There are 8 sizes of womens’ clothing (typically), which would mean 8 different prices! Either the cashier would have to type in the size at the register or there would need to be 8 different bar codes. Exchanging clothes to get a larger or smaller size would be a nightmare.



