Accessible luxury fashion brand building via fat discrimination

• Purpose: To investigate if accessible luxury fashion brands discriminate overweight and obese consumers.Design/methodology/approach: The physical sizes of garments are surveyed in-store and compared to the body sizes of the population. A gap analysis is carried out in order to determine whether the supply of clothes match the demand of each market segment.Findings: The surveyed accessible luxury garments come in very small sizes compared to the individuals that make up the population.Research limitations/implications: The survey is limited to London while the corresponding population is British. It is therefore possible that the mismatch between assortments and the population is in part attributable to geographic and demographic factors. The study’s results are however so strikingly clear that even if some of the effect were due to extraneous variables, it would be hard to disregard the poor match between overweight and obese women and the clothes offered to them.Practical implications: For symbolic/expressive brands that are conspicuously consumed, that narrowly target distinct and homogenous groups of people in industries where elitist practices are acceptable, companies can build brands via customer rejection.Social implications: The results highlight ongoing discrimination of overweight and obese fashion consumers.Originality/value: The study is the first to provide quantitative evidence for brand building via customer rejection, and it delineates under which conditions this may occur. This extends the theory of typical user imagery.

Subject headings

SAMHÄLLSVETENSKAP  -- Ekonomi och näringsliv (hsv//swe)

SOCIAL SCIENCES  -- Economics and Business (hsv//eng)

Keyword

Branding

typical user imagery

assortments

fashion

obesity

fat discrimination

Publication and Content Type

ref (subject category)

art (subject category)