‘Big Guys Don’t Want To Be Treated Like Freaks’: The Plus-Sized Menswear Revolution

The energy at online clothing store Asos hits you as soon as you enter its art deco London headquarters. The place is youthful, noisy, overwhelming. It is also proudly democratic – in the sense that it wants to offer fashionable clothes for everyone. Not, I suspect, because it is on some great mission to change the world, but because it’s not just perfectly honed young men and women who will pay to look good. I am getting a guided tour from the company’s brand creative director, John Mooney. He is spearheading Asos’s drive to improve its offering to what might euphemistically be called the bigger man. I am keen on this euphemism because I am one of those bigger men: 6ft 4in tall; 40in-plus waist; carrying a lot of extra poundage. My mother kindly describes me as big-boned; others would say fat. Either way, for me shopping has always been an unpleasant and often pointless experience – a procession of garments that, even though they proclaimed themselves large, came nowhere near fitting me. I gave up shopping for clothes about 20 years ago, apart from the occasional desperate foray to find something that would just about do. If I did find something (a pair of M&S XL stretch jeans, a black XL top from Lands’ End) I would buy half a dozen and hope they’d see me through. They were, in every sense, distress purchases, and I had adopted a uniform: all black, uninspired, unchanging, shapeless, boring. Read more at The Guardian.