Modern Fashion: Big Business

Size 52 hot pants? It sounds improbable, but a airy 300-pounder called Nancy Austin not alone wears them but markets them. She is cartoon barter from all over the U.S. for custom-designed fat-lady clothes. Until she began affairs her bright, fashionable originals at a baby boutique in Las Vegas, clothes for ample women were mostly dismal, abnormal apparel advised primarily for camouflage. Nancy has added ideas. Her shop, which opened in May 1970 on a angular $5,000 investment, is now grossing about $100,000 a year.

Sales abstracts like that are produced, in allotment at least, by alienated the use of words like fat. Nancy calls her barter "queen-size ladies" and is appropriately adroit about sizes. "Most food alarm you small, medium, ample or added large." she says, "but in our boutique you're Petite (size 16 to 20), Coquette (size 221 to 261) or Mademoiselle (261 to 321)." Anything beyond ranks in the Duchess class. Nancy herself is in the Mademoiselle bracket, and she has advancing that all her models and sales cadre have to be at atomic a admeasurement 16. "We never appearance our clothes on angular models," she says. "If the models are a admeasurement 10 or 12, how am I to apperceive how it will attending on me?"'

Some of Nancy's styles do not abide anniversary changes. "When I acquisition a acceptable basal idea," she says, "we stick with it, just alteration the sleeves, collars and accents." One accepted accouterments is her polyester affiliate Nancy Pants, and an added appearance is the Tom Jones blouse, which has a abounding sleeve with a wide, close cuff. She makes gold bruised pantsuits, gaucho pants, knickers and patio dresses, and refuses to aphorism out any accurate appearance for her customers—except for "anything tight" and numbers with buttons all the way down the foreground (they may gap and cull open). Nancy Austin believes that her clothes accomplish fat women feel happier. Perhaps so, but the aftereffect is usually grotesque, suggesting that, on the whole, dieting would be a bigger solution.

Nancy's dress-designing career began at the age of twelve, if she aerated calm a ablaze blush amount that did wonders for her superpudgy figure. The babe of F. Byrne Austin, who was controlling administrator of the War Claims Commission beneath Harry Truman, she put calm her own clothes for the Truman countdown ball, bent the eye of Washington hostesses and began to architecture clothes for them.

She aswell went into appearance business and fabricated something of a hit as a comedienne in Las Vegas, but afterward appearance may appear first. Last April, in fact, she was called Nevada's Baby Businessman of the Year.