Curvy Girl Journal

Author: Tanya Fields

How Emma Grede Built Good American Into the Size-Inclusive Denim Standard

Walk into the Nordstrom denim hall on the third floor in 2026 and the geography of the room tells you something. The wall closest to the fitting rooms used to belong to the heritage names, the Frame and Mother and Citizens of Humanity tower. That wall is still there. But the run of mannequins facing the escalator, the ones merchandised in sizes 00 through 24 on bodies that are not all the same body, those are wearing Good American. Ten years after Emma Grede and Khloe Kardashian launched the brand in October 2016 with a single denim collection, Good American occupies the floor space that signals what a major retailer believes about where the category is going.

This is a piece about how that happened. Specifically about Grede, because the founder story on this brand has been blurred for a decade by the Kardashian half of the partnership, and the operating-founder half is the half that built the company. Khloe is the public face and a real co-founder. Emma Grede is the CEO who designed the size-inclusive launch model, ran the wholesale strategy that put the brand into Nordstrom and Saks at scale, and has since built two more brands on the same playbook. The trajectory matters because Good American was the first size-inclusive premium denim brand to launch at full retail distribution and not get filed under “niche.” The rest of the category is still catching up.

Who Emma Grede actually is

Grede is British, born in East London in 1982, the eldest of four daughters raised by a single mother. She left school at 16 and started in fashion event production, eventually founding ITB Worldwide, a talent and entertainment marketing agency that produced runway shows and brand partnerships across London, New York, and Los Angeles. By the early 2010s she was running point on celebrity dressing for major fashion weeks and building relationships with the stylist class that would later matter for Good American’s launch.

She met Khloe Kardashian through that work in 2015. The pitch she brought to Kardashian was specific: launch a premium denim brand that sold every size at every price point at the same time, on the same shelf, in the same campaign imagery. Not a “core” range with a “plus” extension launched eighteen months later. Every size from 00 to 24 on day one, priced the same. That single structural decision is what made Good American different from every premium denim brand that came before it, and it is Grede’s idea.

The launch in October 2016 reportedly did one million dollars in sales on day one through the brand’s site, with Nordstrom as the wholesale partner. Grede has been CEO across the full ten-year run. In 2020 she co-founded Skims with Kim Kardashian, where she is also a founding partner and was on the executive team through the brand’s early scaling. In 2021 she launched Safely, a cleaning brand, with Kris Jenner. She was the first Black woman to appear as a guest investor on Shark Tank in 2021. She sits on multiple boards including the Fifteen Percent Pledge. The point is that she is an operator, not a celebrity-adjacent name on a cap table, and Good American is the brand where her operating thesis was first proven.

What the brand actually does

Good American makes denim, ready-to-wear, activewear, swim, and shoes in sizes 00 through 24 (with some categories extending to 32 in select pieces). Denim is still the anchor category and the deepest part of the line. The brand operates from a denim-first lens that the apparel category was built around, not an afterthought to the apparel program.

The denim philosophy is sculpting power-stretch fabrications cut for proportional grading – meaning a size 18 is not just a size 8 enlarged on a flat pattern, it is regraded so the rise sits at the natural waist, the hip room is real, and the inseam doesn’t shorten as you go up. That regrading is the boring technical detail that most premium denim brands skip when they extend sizes. It is the reason Good American jeans actually fit on a size 16-to-20 body without the waistband gapping or the thigh pinching at the inseam.

Price tier is mid-premium – most jeans land at $145 to $195, with the dressier styles and the leather pieces going higher. That puts the brand between contemporary denim like Levi’s premium ranges and luxury denim like Frame and Mother. Distribution is Nordstrom and Saks at full price across all sizes, Bloomingdale’s and Revolve in narrower assortments, plus the brand’s own site and a handful of standalone stores in LA, New York, and Aventura. Notably not at Walmart or Target. The positioning has held at mid-premium for the full decade.

Where the brand gets it right

The first thing Good American got right was the same-size, same-shelf launch principle. Every campaign image since 2016 has included a body that is not a sample size, and the brand’s e-commerce shows the product on at least three different size models per style. This sounds like a marketing detail. It is actually a merchandising detail, because it forces the brand to actually grade and produce the larger sizes in volume rather than as a token gesture. Most premium denim brands that “extended sizing” between 2018 and 2024 did it as a separate website tab with thin inventory. Good American did not.

The second is the denim engineering. The Always Fits line uses a power-stretch fabric that holds the hip and waist without giving out by hour eight. The Good Legs and Good Curve cuts are pattern-graded for hourglass and pear proportions respectively. The Good Waist is the high-rise cut for shorter-torso bodies and the brand explicitly markets it that way. These are real pattern distinctions, not just style names. The way the size 18 Good Curve sits at the natural waist without the back gap is the kind of detail that comes from a brand that actually hires pattern-makers who fit on a curve model, not a size 8 fit form scaled up.

The third is the wholesale credibility. Nordstrom committed shelf space at launch and has expanded the assortment every year since, which is the retail signal that says the sell-through is real. Wholesale buyers at Nordstrom and Saks do not give floor space to brands that don’t move product at full margin. Good American has held both relationships at full pricing for ten years, which in the denim category is a meaningful track record.

The fourth is the brand expansion discipline. Good American has launched into adjacent categories – activewear, swim, ready-to-wear, shoes – on a roughly two-year cadence rather than chasing every trend cycle. Each category extension has carried the same size-range commitment from launch, not as a phase-two extension. The brand could easily have run a faster, more chaotic expansion. The decision to scale slowly with the size principle intact is a Grede decision, and it is one of the reasons the brand has not diluted.

Where there is room

Honest critique. The price is the first place readers push back. A pair of Good American jeans at $165 is a real spend, and the value-per-wear math depends on the cut being a near-perfect fit for your body. If the Good Waist works on you, the cost-per-wear over four years is reasonable. If you are between cuts and have to keep two pairs in rotation because neither is quite right, the math is worse. The brand could do more in the under-$120 tier and has chosen not to, which is a positioning decision but a real friction point for the size 18-and-up shopper who is often the customer with the least disposable income to spend on a single pair of jeans.

The size range claim is also worth pressure-testing. Good American advertises 00 to 24 across denim, but the deepest assortment by far is the 4 to 18 range. Sizes 20, 22, and 24 are routinely the first to sell out and the slowest to restock, and the brand’s standalone stores carry less of the 20+ range than the wholesale partners do. If you wear a 22 or 24, the Nordstrom site is a more reliable place to shop the line than the Good American site itself, which is a strange inversion for a brand whose entire identity is built on size inclusion.

The activewear and swim extensions are not as cleanly engineered as the denim. The activewear leggings run thinner than the denim power-stretch fabric and the compression at the larger sizes is less reliable. The swim cups in the over-DD range are not as supportive as what you can get from Curvy Couture or Cuup. These are extension categories that benefited from the brand halo but have not yet matched the denim’s technical standard. The brand has time to close this gap, but the gap is real today.

How Good American compares to the category

Good American does not exist in a vacuum and it is not the only credible size-inclusive denim option in 2026. Two reference points worth knowing if you are deciding whether to invest in the line.

Universal Standard is the closest direct competitor. Founded in 2015 by Polina Veksler and Alexandra Waldman, Universal Standard launched a year before Good American with a wider size range (00 to 40) and a similar size-inclusive-at-launch principle. The denim is good, the wide-leg trouser is a category-defining piece, and the price is mostly lower than Good American at $120 to $160 for most jeans. The trade-off: the cuts are more relaxed and less sculpting than Good American, the brand leans editorial-minimalist where Good American leans body-conscious-glam, and the wholesale presence is narrower (mostly direct-to-consumer with a Nordstrom partnership that did not stick at the same scale). Universal Standard is the brand to buy if you want a wider size range and a quieter aesthetic. Good American is the brand to buy if you want a high-rise sculpting cut and a polished body-conscious silhouette.

Eloquii sits in the mid-tier comparison. Founded in 2011, acquired by Walmart in 2018, and operating in sizes 14 to 28, Eloquii is the brand most contemporary plus-size shoppers cite as the workwear and event-dressing default. The denim is solid, the dress assortment is broader than Good American’s, and the price is consistently lower at $80 to $140 for most jeans. The trade-off: the denim fabrications are less engineered, the rise grading is less consistent across cuts, and the brand has been through enough merchandising transitions under Walmart ownership that the quality across categories varies more than it used to. Eloquii is the right pick for occasion dressing and a workwear capsule at a more accessible price. Good American is the precision denim choice when you can justify the spend.

What to buy from them

If you are buying Good American for the first time, do not order three styles at once. The cuts vary enough that you want to figure out which one suits your proportions before committing to a wardrobe of them. The five pieces that have earned their permanent rotation place across plus-size editors I trust, and across my own closet at a 16 on top and 18 on the bottom:

The Good Waist high-rise jeans at around $165 are the cut to start with if you have a shorter torso or a defined waist-to-hip ratio. The rise sits at the natural waist without rolling, and the hip room is graded to actual proportions. I own them in two washes and have rotated them weekly for two years.

The Good Curve jeans at around $165 are the pear-proportion answer. The waist sits smaller relative to the hip than the Good Waist cut, which solves the back-gap problem that almost every other premium denim brand has when you go above a size 16. Size up if you are between, the cut runs slightly flat through the thigh.

The Always Fits power-stretch jeans at around $155 are the all-day travel jean. The fabric holds through an eight-hour workday and a flight without giving out, and they recover overnight without losing the shape. The fabric blend is heavy on elastane so they read more polished-stretch than vintage-denim, which is the trade-off.

The Good Legs skinny jeans at around $155 are still in the line for the reader who has not moved on from the skinny silhouette. The cut is sculpting through the calf without pinching at the ankle, which is the failure point of most plus-size skinny denim.

The Good American bodysuit at around $95 is the under-blazer layering piece that holds without rolling at the waist. The cut is long-torso friendly and the cotton-modal fabric is heavier than the Skims equivalent, which is what you want under structured tailoring.

The bigger picture on Good American and Grede

Good American matters as a brand case study because it is the first premium denim brand to prove that size inclusion is a launch principle, not a retrofit. The brand did not extend sizes after it was successful. It launched in 00 to 24, at full wholesale distribution, at premium pricing, and held that structure for ten years through one of the most volatile decades the denim category has ever had. Most of the brands that tried to follow the same model after 2018 quietly walked the size range back when the inventory math got hard. Good American did not.

Emma Grede is the operator who built that model and who has now repeated the size-inclusive-at-launch playbook at Skims, with similar results. The pattern is clear enough at this point that the rest of the contemporary denim category is going to spend the next five years trying to figure out how to compete on it. Khloe Kardashian opened the door at retail and at brand recognition. Grede built the operating engine that walks through it. Both halves of the founding partnership are real, and the brand would not work without either of them, but the half that gets written about less is the half that built the business.

The piece I am wearing as I file this: the Good Waist in a dark indigo, size 18, picked up at the Soho Nordstrom in March. They were $165. The link is below.

May 30, 2026
Pattern Beauty as Industry Case Study – What Tracee Ellis Ross Actually Built

Pattern Beauty occupies a full center-shelf endcap at Ulta in 2026, and that placement is the part of the story the beauty trades stopped paying attention to. The shelf real estate is no longer the news. The news, seven years after launch, is that Pattern is now the brand cited in every conference panel on inclusive product development, in every business-school case write-up on celebrity-founded beauty, and in every PR pitch from a competitor trying to convince an editor their new line is “doing what Pattern did, but for skin.” That second sentence is usually a tell. What Pattern did is harder to copy than the pitch decks suggest.

This is not a hair-care review. This is a fashion-side read on why Pattern Beauty has held up as a case study and why most of the celebrity-founded brands that came after it have not. Tracee Ellis Ross is a fashion fixture – Karla Welch has dressed her in Christopher John Rogers, Sergio Hudson, and Aliétte across the last three award seasons, and Ross has spent twenty years using press tours to talk about under-served product categories before she launched into one. Pattern is what happens when a founder with that level of industry literacy decides to ship rather than license. The result is worth tracking even if you have never bought a curl cream.

The founder profile that made the brand legible

Tracee Ellis Ross spent over a decade publicly searching for the right products for her hair before Pattern existed. Pull any Allure or Vogue cover story she did between 2010 and 2018 and the curl conversation is in there, usually unprompted, often the part that ran on the magazine’s social feed because it was the most quotable section. The pattern (no pun) was consistent: a Black woman with a Hollywood career and access to every stylist in the industry, who still could not find a brand whose entire line was designed for her hair from the formulation stage rather than as an afterthought sub-collection bolted on to an existing range.

In a 2019 Allure interview right before launch, Ross said Pattern had taken her nine years from idea to shelf. Nine years is conspicuously long for a celebrity beauty launch. The industry standard is twelve to eighteen months from announcement to retail, often with a contract manufacturer licensing the celebrity’s likeness onto an existing white-label formula. Ross instead spent that decade co-developing the formulations with chemists who specialized in textured-hair chemistry. The fashion press did not always know what to do with the timeline because most beauty launches it had covered were marketing-led. Pattern was formulation-led, which made it harder to slot into the usual celebrity-line write-up and easier to take seriously once the product was in market.

She launched at Ulta in September 2019. The Ulta partnership is the boring-but-load-bearing part of the origin story. Ulta agreed to display Pattern in the textured-hair section across the chain at launch, not in an aisle endcap and not as a celebrity gondola. Most Black-founded hair brands historically launched at smaller chains or with patchy department-store placement and struggled for shelf space for years. Pattern starting at full Ulta distribution is the structural decision that compressed what should have been a five-year market-presence build into eighteen months.

What the brand actually sells

Pattern makes hair care and tools for Type 3 and Type 4 curl patterns – loose ringlets through tight coils. The line spans the full routine: pre-cleanse oils, cleansers, conditioners, leave-ins, stylers, treatment masks, refresh sprays, and tools including the Shower Brush and the microfiber Curl Cloths. There are now more than thirty SKUs in the lineup, organized as a system rather than as a scattered set of celebrity-PR launches.

The brand’s structural choices are the part the rest of the industry kept studying. Products come in Regular and Heavy sizes, with Heavy formulated for thicker, denser, or more porous hair. That is a lineup choice nearly every adjacent textured-hair brand had skipped. The price tier sits in the mid-premium band – roughly $20 to $28 for most core products, $40 to $60 for tools – which puts Pattern between drugstore lines like Cantu and the prestige tier represented by Briogeo or Olaplex. Distribution today: Ulta nationwide since launch, Sephora since 2024, and pattern.com direct. Not at Walmart and not at mass-grocery, which has held the positioning at a deliberate premium rather than racing to the bottom of the price ladder for short-term volume.

The packaging design is also a fashion-relevant detail. The orange-and-white identity reads as a brand block on a crowded shelf at a distance no other textured-hair line has managed. The bottle silhouettes are consistent across the range, which means the line photographs as a system in editorial spreads and on the shelf. Compare that to most natural-hair lines built incrementally over a decade, where every sub-collection has its own bottle shape and the shelf reads as visual noise.

Where the brand gets it right

The first thing Pattern got right is the foundational formulation discipline. The cleansers actually clean without stripping. The conditioners deliver real slip on Type 4 hair without coating low-porosity strands into limpness. The leave-ins layer under styling cream without piling. Those three tests are where most natural-hair brands fail, and Pattern passes all three across the core lineup. I do not write hair reviews for CGJ – that is Brielle’s beat – but I know enough about the category from a decade in fashion-editor circles to know that consistent formulation across thirty SKUs is the part nobody copies easily.

The second is the tools. The Pattern Shower Brush became a cult item for legitimate reasons. The bristle spacing is wide enough to detangle Type 4 hair under conditioner without snapping strands, and Ross walked through the design rationale in launch interviews in a way that made it clear the tool was engineered against a user need rather than designed as a marketing accessory. That distinction is something the fashion industry recognizes immediately – it is the difference between a designer who sketches a piece and then engineers it to fit a real body, versus a designer who sketches a piece and then asks a contract pattern-maker to size it up cold.

The third is the discipline around product launches. Pattern has shipped roughly five to seven new SKUs per year over the seven-year run, each addressing a documented gap. The 2022 styling cream extension, the 2023 protein treatment, the 2024 heat protectant. None of these were trend-of-the-moment ingredient launches. Compare that cadence to celebrity beauty lines that drop quarterly to feed the press cycle. Pattern’s release calendar reads more like a Christopher John Rogers collection schedule than a celebrity launch calendar, and the audience has rewarded the restraint.

The fourth is the way the brand has used Ross without becoming the Tracee Ellis Ross show. She is centered in marketing, but the brand can run a product campaign without her in every frame. That balance is rare in celebrity beauty. Most lines that depend entirely on the founder’s continued visibility age badly the first time the founder takes a year off. Pattern has built enough product credibility that it can carry campaigns on its own.

Where there is room

Honest critique, because the brand is past the stage where it deserves protection from one.

The price ceiling is real. The Heavy Conditioner at $24 for under eight ounces is not the cheapest option, and the value per ounce is not the strongest in the category. Cantu’s Sulfate-Free Cleansing Cream does a related job for closer to $7. The Pattern formulation is genuinely better, but “better at three times the price” is a math each shopper has to run for themselves, and the fashion-industry framing that pretends mid-premium pricing is neutral does not survive a tighter household budget.

The packaging is not above critique either. The pump-top conditioners can clog as the bottle approaches empty, leaving roughly an ounce of unusable product. The complaint shows up consistently in reviews and Pattern has not redesigned. For a premium-priced line that has otherwise been careful about design, the package-failure problem is a fixable annoyance that has been sitting unfixed for years.

The Sephora distribution that opened in 2024 has been uneven. Some Sephora locations stock only a partial line, and the in-store consultants are sometimes less trained on textured-hair routines than the Ulta team. If you can choose, the Ulta shopping experience is more reliable, which is an awkward thing to say about a brand that just expanded its prestige distribution.

And the line still skews toward Types 3A through 4B more cleanly than 4C. Pattern’s Heavy formulations solve the density problem for some 4C shoppers and not all. A dedicated Extra Heavy sub-line, or a 4C-specific tier, is the obvious gap and the brand has not filled it.

How Pattern reshaped the inclusive-beauty conversation

The reason Pattern matters outside the textured-hair aisle is that it changed what fashion and beauty editors mean when they say “inclusive launch.” Before Pattern, inclusive often meant a thirty-shade foundation range bolted onto an existing complexion line – the Fenty Beauty bar, which Rihanna had set in 2017 and which the rest of the industry had been trying to clear ever since. Pattern raised a different bar. Not “we made enough shades for everyone to find one,” but “the entire line was formulated from scratch with the under-served customer as the central user.” That reframing is what made the case study get cited.

The fashion industry adjacent to beauty noticed for a related reason. Universal Standard had been making the same argument in apparel since 2015 – that a brand built from sizes 00 to 40 by default reads differently to the customer than a brand that adds an “extended” line as an afterthought. Pattern was the beauty-side version of that argument and it landed in the trade conversation at roughly the same time Universal Standard was scaling. The two brands are not directly related but the editorial coverage of inclusive-by-default versus inclusive-by-extension started to converge around 2020 to 2021, and Pattern was the brand the beauty press cited most often as the cleanest example.

The follow-on effects are still working through the industry. Adwoa Beauty, founded by Julian Addo, launched at Sephora in 2017 and accelerated its market presence post-Pattern. Bread Beauty Supply, founded by Maeva Heim and launched at Sephora in 2020, was explicitly framed in press as part of the Pattern-opened category. The category itself is more crowded than it was in 2019, and the brands that have stayed competitive have been the ones that took Pattern’s structural choices seriously – founder-formulator alignment, real retail commitment at launch, mid-premium pricing rather than racing the floor.

What to buy from them

If you are picking up Pattern for the first time, do not buy the full system. The smart move is to add one or two pieces to your existing routine and see how they behave. Five products worth knowing, with the caveat that hair-specific recommendations should be cross-checked against Brielle’s reviews for porosity and density.

The Pattern Heavy Conditioner at $24 is the line’s anchor. The heavier viscosity penetrates better than the regular formulation for thicker or denser hair, and it is the SKU most reviewers have repurchased multiple times.

The Pattern Leave-In Conditioner at $25 layers under styling cream without piling. It is the SKU that delivers the brand’s “moisture without buildup” claim cleanly.

The Pattern Shower Brush at $30 is the tool to buy even if you skip the rest of the line. The bristle spacing is the design detail that justifies the price.

The Pattern Styling Cream at $25 defines curls without crunch on Types 3A through 4A. For 4B and 4C the Heavy version is the right pick.

The Pattern Treatment Mist at $22 is the day-two refresh spray that keeps a wash-and-go looking deliberate longer than most alternatives. Worth knowing about even if you do not buy into the rest of the line.

The bigger picture

Pattern Beauty is a brand case study because it did something the textured-hair category needed and could not get from the conglomerates that had dominated the space for decades. The major hair groups had treated Black hair as an afterthought extension for years. The smaller Black-founded brands that filled the gap were doing real work but were under-resourced and stuck fighting for shelf space. Tracee Ellis Ross brought the celebrity capital, the chemist co-development discipline, and the Ulta distribution agreement in one package, and the brand has executed against that capital for seven years without losing the formulation focus that justified the launch in the first place.

The lesson for the broader category is structural. The brands that win in textured hair from 2026 forward will look more like Pattern than like the brands that came before it. Founded by someone whose hair is the target demographic, formulated with specialty chemists rather than licensed white-label, distributed through retailers that commit shelf space at launch, priced at the mid-premium tier rather than the floor. Pattern set the new template. The rest of the category, and a chunk of the wider beauty industry, is still catching up – and so is the fashion-side conversation about what inclusive product development should actually cost to build properly. The next celebrity beauty pitch that lands on my desk is going to have to clear that bar, not the 2017 one.

May 30, 2026
How Betsie Larkin Built Honeylove Into Shapewear’s Third Name

After tracking forty-plus shapewear conversations across the Nordstrom intimates floor, three plus-size styling appointments, and roughly two years of customer reviews on Reddit and YouTube, one pattern shows up consistently. When a curvy shopper walks in asking for shapewear, the first two brands named are Spanx and Skims. The third name is now almost always Honeylove. That third slot did not exist five years ago. The shapewear category, for the better part of two decades, was a two-horse race between Spanx as the legacy compression brand and Skims as the soft-sculpt newcomer that turned shapewear into a fashion category. The arrival of a credible third option is the most interesting thing that has happened in intimates since the Skims launch in 2019.

Honeylove is the brand sitting in that third slot. It was co-founded in 2018 by Betsie Larkin and her husband Adam, launched out of a Los Angeles apartment on a Kickstarter campaign, and has spent the seven years since building a structural-compression shapewear line that does something materially different from both Spanx and Skims. This piece is about how that happened. Who Larkin actually is, what the brand makes, where it earns the third-name shortlist position, where it still has gaps, and which of the pieces are worth your money if you are deciding whether to add a Honeylove item to the rotation.

The founder story behind the launch

Betsie Larkin (Betsie Goldsmith on some early press) is not a fashion-industry lifer. Before Honeylove she spent more than a decade as a singer-songwriter in the electronic dance music space, with vocal credits on tracks from major producers in the trance and progressive house scene through the late 2000s and 2010s. That career is what funded the early Honeylove prototyping. She has talked in interviews about pulling shapewear apart in her apartment, sketching what she wanted from a piece that did not exist yet, and bringing the rough idea to her husband Adam, who took on the operational side of the early company.

The problem she set out to solve was specific. The shapewear she could buy in 2017 and 2018 either rolled down at the waistband (the legacy Spanx complaint that anyone who has worn a high-waist brief under a dress knows in their bones), or it did not provide real structural compression at all (the Skims complaint – the line skews toward soft smoothing, not waist sculpting). Larkin wanted a piece that held its position through eight hours of wear and actually shaped the midsection rather than smoothing it. The first product was a high-waist brief with what the brand calls Liftwear, a multi-layer waistband with bonded silicone strips and internal boning meant to anchor the garment in place.

The Kickstarter launched in October 2018 and funded its goal within hours. By 2020 the brand had moved beyond briefs into bodysuits, leggings, bike shorts, and the SuperPower line that is now the flagship. Distribution today: Honeylove direct (honeylove.com), Nordstrom, Bloomingdale’s, and a small Amazon presence. The brand has stayed independent, which is unusual in a category where most successful shapewear lines get acquired by a conglomerate within five years.

What the brand actually makes

Honeylove sells structural-compression shapewear. The lineup covers high-waist briefs, mid-thigh shorts, full bodysuits, sculpting bras, smoothing camisoles, leggings, and a small loungewear extension. The structural philosophy is consistent across the line. Every piece is built with the Liftwear waistband or a related bonded-panel system, internal mesh boning at the side seams, and stitched silicone grippers at the leg and bust openings. That construction is the brand’s actual differentiator. It is the reason a Honeylove brief stays at the rib cage through dinner instead of rolling to the navel by appetizers.

The price tier sits firmly above mass-market and below couture. Briefs run roughly $60 to $80. Bodysuits sit at $100 to $130, with the SuperPower Short Bodysuit at the top of that range. Leggings and bike shorts run $70 to $95. Bras are $50 to $75. This is not Target shapewear pricing, and the brand has not chased the bottom of the market. The size range runs XS through 3X across most of the line, with some pieces extending to 4X. That ceiling, somewhere around US size 24, is one of the brand’s real limits and worth knowing about going in.

The fabric mix is the other consistent choice. Honeylove uses a heavier compression knit than Skims and a lighter, more breathable knit than the densest Spanx pieces. The result wears warmer than a smoothing piece from Skims Fits Everybody and cooler than the Spanx Suit Yourself. For a humid summer event the SuperPower will sit in a wearable middle. For a December black-tie it disappears under a column dress without trapping heat.

Where the brand gets it right

The first thing Honeylove earns the shortlist position for is the waistband engineering. The Liftwear waistband works. It is the most under-discussed innovation in shapewear of the last decade, and it is the reason the brand expanded beyond Kickstarter into actual retail shelves. A piece of shapewear that holds its position through eight hours is a different garment from one that does not, and Larkin’s insistence on solving that problem at the construction level rather than papering over it with marketing is the foundational reason the brand exists.

The second is the bodysuit category specifically. The SuperPower Short Bodysuit is the piece most curvy women I know who own Honeylove repurchase. The cut runs flat through the bust without flattening, the leg-hole grippers actually stay put through a full evening, and the snap closure at the gusset is reinforced enough to survive normal restroom use without unsnapping mid-event. For a curvy size 16-18 wearing the bodysuit under a slip dress or a body-skimming knit, the silhouette holds without the visible-panel-line problem that Spanx Suit Yourself sometimes shows through thinner fabrics.

The third is the customer service operation. Honeylove runs a 60-day try-on return window, with prepaid return shipping included in the box. For a shapewear category where fit is fundamentally guess-work without trying the piece on, the generous return window matters more than the marketing copy on the product page. The brand has staked real money on letting customers buy two sizes and return one, and the operational consistency of the return process is part of what has built the third-name credibility.

The fourth is the brand voice, which has stayed founder-anchored without becoming a personality cult. Larkin appears in some marketing but the campaigns are not built around her face the way Skims is built around Kim Kardashian. The brand can sell on the product without needing the founder in every campaign, which is the kind of structural durability that lets a brand survive a founder taking a step back.

Where there is room

Real critique. The price ceiling is the first thing curvy shoppers run into. At $130 for the SuperPower Short Bodysuit, Honeylove is priced above the comparable Spanx Suit Yourself bodysuit and well above the Skims Sculpting and Fits Everybody bodysuits. The construction justifies a premium, but it is a premium that prices the brand out of reach for shoppers who need three or four shapewear pieces in rotation. A single $130 bodysuit is a different financial conversation from a $48 Skims piece.

The second is breathability on the structural panels. The Liftwear waistband and the bonded silicone grippers are part of why the brand works, and they are also part of why the pieces can wear warmer than a softer competitor. For an outdoor August wedding in the South the SuperPower can run hot. The brand has rolled out lighter-weight variants over the last two years but the structural pieces are still warmer than a Skims equivalent.

The third is the size ceiling. Most of the line stops at 3X, which lands around a US 22-24. For shoppers above a 24, Honeylove is not a viable option. The brand has expanded the size range gradually over the seven-year run but has not yet reached the size 28-30 ceiling that Universal Standard and some Eloquii shapewear pieces hit. For the larger end of plus, Spanx still goes higher and a few specialty brands like Glamorise and Shapermint reach further.

The fourth is the bra category, which has felt secondary to the shapewear lineup. The Honeylove bras are competent but not category-defining the way the bodysuits and briefs are. Curvy shoppers in a 38DDD or above will get more reliable lift from Wacoal, Glamorise, or Curvy Couture than from Honeylove’s bra line.

How Honeylove compares to the rest of the category

Honeylove does not exist in isolation. The two reference points worth knowing if you are deciding whether to put a Honeylove piece in your rotation are Spanx and Skims, and the comparison is structural rather than purely about price.

Spanx is the legacy brand and still the volume leader. The Suit Yourself bodysuit, which has been in the line for years and recently saw a refresh, is the most direct competitor to the Honeylove SuperPower. Spanx runs slightly cheaper at the bodysuit level (Suit Yourself sits around $98 to $110 depending on style), and the size range stops higher (most Spanx pieces run up to size 3X or 4X with some pieces going further). The trade-off: the Spanx waistband does not hold its position as reliably as the Honeylove Liftwear, and the silhouette through the midsection is smoother but less sculpted. If you want compression that disappears, Spanx. If you want compression that shapes, Honeylove.

Skims is the soft-smoothing brand and a different product philosophy. The Fits Everybody and Sculpting lines are built for smoothing layer-piece comfort rather than structural waist sculpting. Prices run lower (Fits Everybody bodysuits start around $58, Sculpting around $78), the size range runs broader (XXS through 5X on many pieces), and the silhouette is intentionally less aggressive. The trade-off: Skims smooths but does not shape. For wearing under a knit dress where you want a clean line, Skims is right. For wearing under a structured event dress where you want a defined waist, Honeylove is right.

The honest verdict: these three brands do not cancel each other out. Most curvy shoppers I know who own all three rotate them by occasion. Skims for everyday under T-shirt dresses and knits. Spanx for the high-coverage smoothing piece under a column. Honeylove for the events where the waist needs to be defined, not just covered.

What to buy from them

If you are starting with Honeylove for the first time, do not buy the full lineup. The brand sizes inconsistently across product categories and the smart move is to add one piece, wear it through a real event, and decide whether to expand from there. The pieces that have earned their place in most curvy rotations:

The Honeylove SuperPower Short Bodysuit at $130 is the flagship and the piece I recommend trying first. For a size 16-18 with a longer torso, size up. The bonded panel structure does the actual work the brand sells, and this is the piece that earned Honeylove the third-slot shortlist position.

The Honeylove Liftwear High-Waist Brief at $68 is the piece that started the brand on Kickstarter and the most reliable entry-point if you do not need a full bodysuit. Holds at the rib cage through dinner. Runs true to size.

The Honeylove Sculptwear Mid-Thigh Short at $80 is the under-dress piece for any occasion where you need anti-chafing coverage plus light shaping. The leg grippers actually stay put through a full day of walking.

The Honeylove Crossover Bra at $58 is the most credible piece in their bra category, particularly for B-D cup curvy shoppers who want a structured wireless option. Above a DDD, look at Wacoal or Curvy Couture instead.

The Honeylove SuperPower Thong Bodysuit at $125 is the version of the flagship for wearing under thinner fabrics where the short-bodysuit leg line would show. Same structural compression, no visible panty line through silk or thin knit.

Why this brand matters for the category

Honeylove earns the third-name shortlist position because it solved a structural problem in a category that the industry had treated as mature. The shapewear market had two dominant brands and a long tail of low-quality alternatives, and the working assumption was that there was nothing material left to innovate on. Betsie Larkin pulled apart a piece of shapewear in her apartment, sketched a waistband that did not exist yet, and spent the next seven years executing against the idea with enough discipline to build a brand that now sits on the same shopping list as Spanx and Skims. The fact that the brand has stayed independent through that growth is the most interesting part of the trajectory. Most successful intimates brands get acquired by a conglomerate by year five and lose the founder discipline that made them work in the first place. For curvy shoppers the practical takeaway is that the shapewear conversation has changed. The third name on the shortlist is real, the construction earns the price premium for the right occasion, and the SuperPower Short Bodysuit in a 2X is the piece worth trying first. I have mine in nude under a Christopher John Rogers black knit that I wear every winter. The link is in the section above.

May 29, 2026
How to Style Plus-Size Baggy Jeans Without Losing the Shape

After three years of covering plus-size denim almost weekly, I have watched the baggy jean cycle through three distinct iterations – the carpenter-tinged 2022 version, the slouchier 2023 dad-jean wave, and the cleaner column cut brands are building around for FW25. Every time the silhouette comes back, the same complaint shows up in my inbox: a plus-size reader bought the jean she saw on a size-6 Pinterest model, put it on, and the whole outfit collapsed into a shapeless shape. The jean was fine. The styling was wrong, because nobody told her the rules change above size 14.

Baggy denim on a plus-size frame is a real silhouette, not a compromise version of the trend. Done right it reads as deliberate and runway-aware. Done wrong it reads as borrowed-from-the-boyfriend with no architecture. The difference is four decisions: where the waistband sits, how you handle the tuck, what shoe goes under it, and what proportion the top half is doing. The principles hold across Universal Standard, Eloquii, Good American, Madewell Curvy, and the Old Navy plus extension – the four brands currently making the cleanest baggy cuts above size 18.

What “baggy” actually means on a plus-size body

The word baggy is doing a lot of work right now and it covers at least four distinct cuts. The straight-leg dad jean is column-shaped from hip to ankle with maybe a quarter-inch of taper, sits high on the natural waist, and reads as the cleanest baggy option for plus-size shoppers. The wide-leg, which gets called baggy interchangeably, flares from the knee down. The carpenter or workwear baggy is straight but cut roomier through the seat and thigh with utility detailing. The true slouch baggy has a dropped crotch and exaggerated volume from the hip down.

On a plus-size body those four cuts are not interchangeable, and retail marketing copy will not tell you which one you’re looking at. A straight-leg dad jean in a size 20 from Universal Standard‘s plus line skims the hip and columns down with maybe two inches of ease through the thigh. A true slouch baggy in the same size adds four to six inches of fabric across the seat, which on a size-20 hip is a meaningful amount of additional visual volume. Both are called baggy. Only one is doing the column thing.

The cut to start with, if you have not been wearing baggy denim and want to ease in, is the high-rise straight-leg dad jean. It works across plus-size shapes – hourglass, pear, inverted triangle, rectangle – with minor styling tweaks, and produces a column line that lengthens rather than spreading. Universal Standard‘s Donna and Eloquii’s Wide Leg Trouser Jean are the two I keep coming back to. Build up to the truer slouch once the proportion math is working for you in the cleaner cut first.

The volume rule: anchor the top, let the bottom breathe

The single most useful principle for styling plus-size baggy jeans is volume balance. The jean is doing the volume work for the outfit, so the top half needs to contain itself. That does not mean tight or compressive. It means fitted at the waist with a clean line through the torso. The pin-saved Pinterest tutorial – cropped baby tee, no tuck, chunky sneaker – is designed for a 24-inch waist where volume contrast creates the look. On a plus-size body that same formula produces one undifferentiated mass from shoulder to floor.

The default formulas that work across shapes: a ribbed tank tucked into the waistband with a slim belt and an unbuttoned shirt or blazer worn open over it – the editor-uniform version, photographs cleanly at any size. A fitted long-sleeve knit, half-tucked at the front waistband so the back hangs naturally and the front signals waist – most forgiving for days you do not want a full tuck. A cropped knit cardigan ending right at the waistband seam, worn over a fitted tank, which lets you skip the tuck entirely. A fitted turtleneck tucked in for cold weather, which extends the column line and reads polished with minimal effort.

What does not work: oversized graphic tees worn untucked over baggy jeans, billowy peasant blouses, drapey cardigans hanging to mid-thigh, hoodies pulled down over the waistband. Each layers volume on volume and erases the waist. You can wear an oversized top with a baggy jean – I do it – but you have to French-tuck the front and accept you are styling for a specific look rather than throwing things on.

Tucks, belts, and the architecture of the waistband

The tuck is the technical move that separates a baggy-jean outfit that works from one that does not. On a plus-size body in a high-rise baggy jean, the waistband sits at the natural waist – the smallest point of the torso. That is the line you want to define. Hiding it under an untucked top throws away the entire shape advantage the jean is built around.

The full tuck works best with thin or medium-weight fabrics. A cotton ribbed tank, a silk camisole, a fine merino sweater. Heavy fabrics like a chunky knit or a structured button-up bunch awkwardly when fully tucked and create bulk at the waistband. For those, use a French tuck or front tuck – tuck only the front center, three to four inches wide, and let the sides and back drape. Waist signal without the bulk.

The belt is the other architectural tool. A slim belt, half an inch to one inch wide, in brown, cognac, or black leather, threaded through the loops of a high-rise baggy jean, does three things at once: defines the waist, adds a horizontal line that balances the proportion, and pulls the outfit out of casual into intentional. Madewell, Universal Standard, and Eloquii all make slim belts in extended sizes. Skip the wide statement belts on a baggy jean – they fight the volume. If your jean does not have functional belt loops, the cropped layer becomes your waist signal instead: a boxy cropped sweater, a leather jacket cut at the natural waist, a structured cardigan with a deliberate hem at the waist.

Shoes that make a baggy jean read intentional

Shoes are where most plus-size baggy-jean outfits go wrong, and the mistake is almost always going too chunky. The instinct is reasonable: if the jean is voluminous, a substantial shoe should balance it. The reality on a plus-size frame is that a chunky sneaker or platform boot under a wide-leg jean reads as one unbroken mass from knee to floor and adds visual weight at exactly the ankle, which is where you want the line to taper.

The shoes that work, ranked by how reliably they look intentional: a slim loafer in brown or black leather, which lets the hem break cleanly over the top of the shoe. A pointed-toe flat or low pump, which extends the line of the leg through the foot. A clean low sneaker – a leather Vionic, a Naturalizer, an Allbirds Tree Runner – casual without ankle bulk. A western ankle boot with a slim shaft, which slides under the hem of a wide-leg jean and disappears.

Hem length matters more than most people realize. A baggy jean should hit either right at the top of your shoe with a slight break, or be cropped at the ankle bone. Hems pooling three or four inches of fabric on top of the shoe read as ill-fitting regardless of how good the jean is. If your jean is too long, get it hemmed at a local tailor – twelve to fifteen dollars and the outfit upgrades.

Layering jackets and outerwear over the volume

Outerwear with a baggy jean is the place to introduce structure back into the outfit. The baggy half is below the waist; everything above can be more architectural. The jackets that work hardest with this silhouette are the ones with a defined shoulder and a hem at or just below the natural waist. A cropped leather moto jacket, a boxy cropped denim jacket worn over a tucked tank, a tailored blazer in wool or linen, a fitted bomber with a banded waist.

Longer coats also work, but the rules change. A long wool coat or trench in a clean line – knee-length or longer, single-breasted, with a defined shoulder – looks polished over baggy jeans because it creates a vertical column that contains the volume. A long puffer or oversized parka adds bulk to bulk and turns the outfit into a marshmallow situation. If you want a puffer, get a cropped one that ends at the natural waist and lets the jean continue the line.

For the in-between weather most of us live in eight months a year, the combination I default to is a fitted long-sleeve knit, baggy jean, slim belt, loafer, and an unbuttoned button-up worn open as a layer. The unbuttoned shirt acts like a lightweight cardigan, adds a third color or pattern, and keeps the shoulders defined without committing to a jacket. J.Crew’s plus extension and Madewell Curvy both make this kind of layering shirt in size-inclusive runs.

Troubleshooting the most common baggy-jean fails

If the outfit feels off in the mirror and you cannot name why, run through these diagnostics in order. They are the failure modes I see most often, and most are fixable in under sixty seconds.

First, the lost waist. If the outfit reads as a single shape from shoulder to ankle, you are missing the waist signal. Fix: tuck the top, add a slim belt, swap to a cropped layer that ends at the waistband, or front-tuck if a full tuck looks bulky. Pick one and the outfit reorganizes. Second, the swallowed shoe. If your hem is pooling over the top of your shoe in three inches of stacked fabric, the jean is too long. Get it hemmed, or roll the hem once for a structured cuff that lets the shoe become visible again.

Third, the top-heavy collapse. If your shoulders or bust feel like they are dominating the outfit and the jean is reading as an afterthought, your top has too much volume relative to the bottom. Switch to a fitted top, or add a slim belt to reintroduce waist definition. The baggy jean should be the loudest piece in the outfit, not the quietest. Fourth, the saggy seat. If the jean is bagging out behind you within an hour of wearing it, the fabric has too much elastane and is overstretching without recovering, or you sized down. Look for 92-98 percent cotton with 2-6 percent elastane – Universal Standard and Madewell Curvy consistently land there.

The pieces worth investing in

The minimum kit for styling baggy jeans well across a season is smaller than you would think. One pair of high-rise straight-leg dad jeans in a dark wash from a curve-engineered brand – Universal Standard’s Donna wide-leg is my pick because the rise actually hits at the natural waist on a plus-size body and the fabric weight holds shape. Two or three ribbed tanks in white, black, and cream from Old Navy’s plus extension or Madewell Curvy. A slim leather belt in cognac or brown – a Madewell belt in extended sizes runs around $40 and lasts. A pair of loafers in brown or black leather; Naturalizer and Cole Haan both carry wide widths in styles that hold up.

To extend the formula across a season, add a cropped denim jacket, a cropped cardigan in cream or oatmeal, and a fitted black turtleneck. Eloquii’s Wide Leg Trouser Jean in dark indigo is the polished variation if you want a second pair that dresses up easier than a dad jean.

Frequently asked questions

Can I wear baggy jeans if I am short (under 5’4″)?

Yes, with adjustments. Look for a cropped wide-leg or cropped straight-leg version, which most brands now carry at 24-26 inch inseams. If you can only find regular length, get it hemmed to the ankle bone – twelve to fifteen dollars at any tailor and the volume stops overwhelming your frame. Pair with a pointed-toe shoe rather than a flat round-toe to add visual length to the leg. The fitted top half is non-negotiable at shorter heights because volume contrast matters more.

Are baggy jeans flattering on plus-size pear shapes specifically?

They can be, and they are one of the better cuts for pear shapes when styled correctly. The volume in the leg balances the volume in the hip, creating a column line that reads proportional rather than bottom-heavy. The rule for pears specifically is to keep the volume even from hip to ankle (straight-leg dad jean) rather than flaring from the knee, because the flare can amplify hip width. Pair with a fitted top and a belt to define the waist.

How baggy is too baggy for a plus-size body?

If you cannot pinch and find a defined waistband at the natural waist, the jean is too baggy for flattering plus-size styling. The waistband is the architectural anchor of the entire outfit, and a true slouch jean with a dropped or loose waist removes that anchor. Stick with cuts that sit firmly at the natural waist (high-rise, 11 inches or more in the front rise) and have a defined waistband seam. The volume below the waist can be substantial; the waistband itself should not be.

What about wearing baggy jeans to work?

Depends on the dress code, but a tailored take on the silhouette works in most business-casual environments. Swap the dad jean for a wide-leg trouser jean in dark indigo or black, tuck a fitted silk shell or fine merino knit in, add a slim belt, finish with a pointed loafer or low pump. A blazer worn open over the top reads as office-appropriate. The Eloquii Wide Leg Trouser Jean is the version I recommend most often for work because the fabric is heavier.

Final word

Styling plus-size baggy jeans well is mostly about respecting the architecture: anchor the waist, contain the top, pick a shoe that does not double the ankle, and let the jean be the loudest piece. The one I keep reaching for is Universal Standard‘s Donna wide-leg in dark indigo, size 18, around $98 on the Universal Standard site – it has held shape through twenty wears and a half-dozen washes, and it works under a tucked tank, a cropped cardigan, or a blazer with equal ease. Buy that one, hem it if you need to, and the rest of the outfits build themselves around it.

May 28, 2026
How to Style Plus-Size Barrel Jeans Without Drowning in the Cut
I have a friend who texted me a fitting-room photo last spring and asked, point blank, whether barrel jeans were a trap. She’d pulled on a size 20, taken one look at the curved leg ballooning around her thigh, and decided the trend was a conspiracy against anyone above a 14. I sent back a three-paragraph voice note. The trend is not a trap. The styling defaults that work for a wide-leg or straight-leg jean do not transfer to a barrel, and most plus-size content has not caught up.

Barrel jeans landed in 2023 as a runway niche and went fully mainstream by FW25, when the curved-leg silhouette showed up in every plus-size extension from Universal Standard to Eloquii to Old Navy. The cut is now a real menu option through size 32. What follows is the framework I use with friends and readers – the jeans have to read intentional, not costumey, by 9 a.m. on a Tuesday. It covers what the cut is, how to read it in your size, and the top, shoe, and outerwear pairings that hold the silhouette together rather than letting it eat you.

What a barrel jean actually is

The barrel jean is defined by a curved leg that flares slightly through the thigh, peaks in volume around the knee, and tapers back in at the ankle. The silhouette traces a soft barrel shape rather than the flat column of a wide-leg or the straight tube of a relaxed straight. The defining detail is the taper at the ankle, usually landing somewhere between the ankle bone and mid-calf depending on the brand’s drop. That taper is what separates a barrel from a balloon jean, which keeps the full volume all the way to the hem and reads much more theatrical.

Most plus-size barrels cut the curve in the back panel rather than relying entirely on the side seam. That detail matters because it means the silhouette holds its shape standing still. A barrel curved only through the side seam collapses against the leg by hour two and you end up looking like you’re wearing a stretched-out wide-leg with a weird hem. Pinch the inseam between thumb and forefinger in the fitting room. If you feel a true three-dimensional curve, the pattern is engineered. If it feels flat, the cut is decorative.

The rise on a well-cut plus-size barrel is high – eleven inches or more through the front – and the waistband is contour-cut, not straight. This is non-negotiable because the leg volume needs to anchor above your natural waist or the jean reads bottom-heavy. Universal Standard, Good American, and Eloquii cut their barrel options at a true high rise. Old Navy’s plus barrel runs a half-inch lower. Knowing the rise number before you order saves a return cycle.

Why this matters for plus-size bodies

Most plus-size styling guides go wrong on this cut because they treat barrel jeans as just another wide silhouette and recommend the same oversized-top pairings that work with a wide-leg. The math is different. A wide-leg reads as a column. A barrel creates volume in the middle of the leg, which means a long oversized top doubles down on that midsection volume and compresses your visible height by three or four inches.

Plus-size bodies with any meaningful hip-to-thigh measurement difference – which is most of us – are particularly sensitive to this. The barrel’s peak volume hits where the eye is already drawn on a pear or hourglass shape, so styling has to actively redirect visual weight up the body. That means a tucked or partial-tuck top, a defined shoulder line, and a shoe that elongates the leg below the hem. Skip any one of those and the jean wears you.

There’s also a length issue. Most plus-size barrels are graded on a 27 to 28 inch regular inseam, shorter than the 28 to 30 inches standard on wide-leg cuts because the taper is meant to crop slightly above the ankle. If you’re 5’7″ or taller, you want the tall inseam (29 to 31 inches). If you’re 5’4″ or shorter, the regular cut often lands closer to mid-calf, which is a different silhouette entirely and rarely flattering.

The tops that hold the silhouette

The single most important rule for plus-size barrel jeans is that the top has to define your waist or your shoulder line, ideally both. The barrel’s volume needs a structural counterweight up top. The four categories that consistently work are fitted knits, partial-tuck button-ups, structured blazers, and cropped-but-not-bralette tops that hit at the high hip.

A fitted ribbed tank or a tucked-front bodysuit is the cleanest starting point. The ribbed texture adds visual interest without bulk, and tucking the front into the waistband (while leaving the back loose, the French tuck you’ve heard about for fifteen years) creates the waist anchor the jean needs. I wear a size 18 in the Universal Standard Soft Rib tank tucked into their barrel cut at least once a week. The combination reads polished even with sneakers, which is the actual test of a working outfit.

Structured blazers are the secret weapon for this cut. A blazer with a built-up shoulder and a nipped waist pulls the eye up and gives the silhouette the inverted-triangle line that balances the barrel’s volume below. Look for a denser fabric – tropical wool, structured cotton twill, or a polyester wool blend at 70/30 minimum. Anything floppy undoes the work. Eloquii’s structured single-breasted blazer in their workwear line does this job well, and Old Navy’s plus blazer collection has improved meaningfully since 2024 if you want a lower price tier.

Now the tops that swallow the silhouette: oversized sweatshirts, long flowy tunics, anything cropped above the navel, drop-shoulder oversized button-ups, and graphic tees in a relaxed cut. All of these create either too much volume in the upper body to balance the barrel, or too little structure to anchor it. The exception is a deliberately cropped boxy tee tucked at the front, which works because the high-hip break still defines a waistline. Rule of thumb: if your top would look correct with cargo pants, it will overwhelm a barrel jean.

Shoes that finish the leg line

The shoe choice on a barrel jean is doing more work than people realize. Because the leg tapers above the ankle, whatever sits below that taper becomes part of the silhouette. The wrong shoe creates a horizontal break that visually chops your leg in half. The right shoe extends the line and lets the jean’s tapered hem work as a frame.

Pointed-toe ankle boots in a color that approximates your skin tone, or in black, are the most reliable choice. The point extends the visual line of the leg past the actual hem, which is exactly what you want with a tapered cut. A block heel between one and two inches adds height without making the proportion read like you’re trying. I have worn the Naturalizer pointed bootie in black for two years through three pairs of barrel jeans and the proportion is correct every time. Cole Haan has similar shaping at a slightly higher price.

Sneakers work, but the silhouette matters. A low-profile sneaker in clean white or off-white extends the leg line and reads modern. Chunky platform sneakers fight the cut because they add volume right where the jean is trying to taper. If you want a chunkier sole, go with clean cream or white rather than a multi-color pattern – the visual quiet keeps the proportion clean.

What to skip: round-toe loafers that sit flat against the foot, mid-calf boots that compete with the ankle taper, anything with a wide ankle strap that creates a horizontal line right at the visual break point, and slides or flip-flops if you’re going for an actual look. Heeled mules with a pointed toe are a possible exception but require a tall enough heel (2 inches minimum) to create the leg-line extension. Anything in between just looks like you didn’t decide.

Outerwear without doubling the volume

Outerwear is where the most expensive mistakes happen because the wrong coat undoes every other correct choice. The cardinal rule: your coat should not add visible volume below the hip line. The barrel jean is already doing volume work in the leg. A puffer that hits mid-thigh or a long oversized cocoon coat layered over a barrel creates a Michelin-tire silhouette that even Karla Welch could not save.

The outerwear that holds up: a structured trench at hip or just-below-hip length, a tailored topcoat in a wool blend that grazes the hip, a cropped moto jacket in leather or a leather alternative, and a fitted denim trucker in a different wash from your jeans (a contrast wash or true black). All four cut the silhouette at a structural point that emphasizes your waist rather than compounding the lower-body volume. A single-breasted topcoat at 70 percent wool minimum is the most useful piece here and outlasts trend cycles by years. Universal Standard, Eloquii, and J.Crew extended all carry this shape through size 28.

If the weather requires a longer coat, the coat itself has to be slim through the body. A floor-length wool with a defined waist and minimal volume in the skirt – the kind you see in Theory or Vince extended – sits cleanly over a barrel. Tie the belt at your natural waist. Skip any coat marketed as voluminous or cocoon. The volume math always loses. For layering underneath, a thin merino crewneck tucked into the jeans and topped with a structured blazer works through fall and most temperate winters. Avoid bulky chunky sweaters under outerwear with this jean.

Fitting-room signals this pair is wrong

Some barrel jeans are not going to work no matter what you do in styling, and you can tell within sixty seconds in the fitting room. The five signals to watch for:
1. The taper hits the wrong place on your leg. A correctly-graded barrel taper should land just above your ankle bone. If it lands at mid-calf or below the bone on your foot, the inseam is wrong for your height and you need a different length, not a different size.
2. The volume collapses against your thigh when you stand still. Walk around the fitting room. Sit down and stand up. If the curve flattens against your leg within a minute, the pattern is decorative rather than engineered and the jean reads sad by hour two.
3. The waistband gap is wider than a finger. A small gap is fixable with a $15 to $25 tailor take-in. A two-finger gap means the brand’s hip-to-waist ratio is too far off your body for the jean to work without major reconstruction.
4. The fabric refuses to drape. Barrel jeans depend on the fabric having enough weight and drape to hold the curve. Stiff denim with no movement reads as costume. You want eleven to thirteen ounce weight with around 2 percent elastane for recovery without sagging.
5. The front-pocket bag is visible from the side. If you can see the pocket lining poking out, the pocket placement is wrong for your hip and you’ll be tugging at it all day. Pinch and check before you buy.
What to keep on hand

You don’t need much. A soft cloth measuring tape from any basic sewing tape on Amazon for under $5 covers the waist, hip, and inseam measurements you need to size confidently across brands. A notebook page or Notes app entry tracking the actual inseam landing point and waistband gap on each barrel pair you’ve tried gives you a reference set so you stop re-learning the same lesson with every order.

The brand starting points worth knowing: Universal Standard’s barrel cut runs through size 40 with a true high rise and a contour waistband. Eloquii’s barrel runs through size 28 and has a slightly looser hip grade that works well on a pear shape. Old Navy’s plus barrel is the budget pick. Good American extended sizes do barrel with the heaviest fabric weight of the four and the silhouette holds the longest. For tailoring, a neighborhood specialist who works on denim is worth more than a cheaper general alterations shop. The hem alteration on this cut has to preserve the taper curve, which not every tailor will take on.

Frequently asked questions

Are barrel jeans only for tall women?

No, but the proportion math changes by height. Under 5’4″, look for the petite or short inseam in barrel cuts so the taper still lands above your ankle bone rather than at mid-calf. Most plus-size brands now offer petite cuts in their barrel options, but you have to filter for them. If the brand doesn’t make a petite, plan on a $20 to $30 hem alteration as part of the purchase cost.

Can I wear barrel jeans to work?

In most workplaces, yes, if you style them correctly. A dark indigo or black barrel paired with a structured blazer, a tucked silk-blend top, and a pointed bootie reads as deliberate workwear. Skip light washes, distressing, or any styling that leans casual. The cut itself is no longer fashion-forward enough to read as risky in most offices, but the proportion still needs to be intentional rather than weekend-pulled-together.

What’s the difference between a barrel jean and a balloon jean?

A barrel tapers back in at the ankle. A balloon keeps the full volume to the hem. The barrel is the more wearable of the two for most plus-size bodies because the taper creates a defined ankle break that lets the shoe finish the silhouette. The balloon requires a much more specific styling vocabulary and reads more costumey if you get the top or shoe wrong. Start with barrel; advance to balloon if you genuinely love the shape.

Will barrel jeans look dated in two years?

The most extreme cuts (very high curve, very dramatic taper) will likely read 2024-2026 within a couple of seasons, the way ultra-skinny jeans now read 2014. A moderate barrel in a dark wash with a clean high-rise waistband will outlast the trend cycle because the silhouette is fundamentally a softened version of a wide-leg, which is a perennial. Buy the moderate version first and let the trendier cuts come and go.

Final word

Plus-size barrel jeans are not the trend that’s going to humiliate you. They’re a silhouette that responds well to specific styling rules and badly to defaults. Pick a true high rise, anchor the waist with a tucked or partial-tuck top, finish the leg with a pointed or low-profile shoe, and keep the outerwear above the hip. Get the hem tailored if it lands wrong. Skip the cuts where the curve collapses against your leg. The pair I reach for is the Universal Standard barrel in dark indigo, size 18, $108. The hem got a $25 alteration to hit just above my ankle bone. The link’s below.
May 28, 2026
The 120-Year History of Lane Bryant, the Brand That Built American Plus-Size Retail

In 1904, a nineteen-year-old Lithuanian immigrant named Lena Himmelstein took her single-needle sewing machine into a small Manhattan storefront on Fifth Avenue and started sewing tea gowns and lingerie for women in her neighborhood. She had been widowed at twenty-three, raising her infant son David, and the sewing machine had been a wedding gift from her late husband. One of her clients, pregnant and trying to navigate Edwardian society without admitting it, asked Lena to make her something she could leave the house in. Lena pleated an elastic waistband into a wool tea gown. That dress is the founding artifact of American plus-size retail, even though “plus-size” as a category did not exist yet and would not exist as a clean retail concept for another three decades.

This is the long version of the Lane Bryant story. 121 years, four ownership eras, two near-death restructurings, and one quiet truth the brand has not fully resolved: Lane Bryant invented the plus-size department store and then spent the back half of its history figuring out what to do with the thing it invented after the rest of the industry caught up. Every other plus brand on the racks today is either standing on Lane Bryant’s shoulders or actively arguing with the playbook Lane Bryant wrote.

The founder story you only half know

Lena arrived at Ellis Island from Lithuania in 1895 at age sixteen with $1 in her pocket and a sister already in New York. She took a job as a seamstress earning $1 a week, then moved to a higher-paying corset house at $15 a week. In 1899 she married a jeweler named David Bryant, had a son, and was widowed within two years. She fell back on the sewing skills and opened the Fifth Avenue shop in 1904 on custom commissions for women in her immediate neighborhood.

The maternity-dress innovation – a pleated elastic waistband let into a tea gown so it could expand with the pregnancy – was so unusual in 1904 that newspapers refused to advertise the garment for years. Maternity was something a woman was supposed to hide. Lena’s first newspaper ad did not run until 1911, when the New York Herald finally agreed. The ad sold out the entire stock the next day. By 1915 she had remarried, to engineer Albert Malsin, who built the merchandising side around her design instincts. The name itself is the detail most people know: a bank teller misspelled “Lena” as “Lane” on her business account paperwork and she kept the typo because it was already on the checks. Pragmatic.

The pivot from maternity to plus-size happened in the late 1910s, and Albert Malsin saw it first. He noticed that many of Lane Bryant’s maternity customers were not actually pregnant – they were plus-size women who could not buy dresses anywhere else and were ordering the maternity line because it was the only ready-to-wear in the country cut for fuller figures. Albert commissioned a statistical study of 4,500 women’s measurements, one of the first applied anthropometric studies in American retail, and used the data to draft a standardized plus-size grading system. In 1923 the company launched the “Stout Women’s” line, the first ready-to-wear plus-size collection sold at retail in the United States. By 1923 Lane Bryant was doing roughly $5 million in annual sales.

What the brand actually does, then and now

Lane Bryant in its current form sells women’s apparel in US sizes 10 through 40, with the deepest assortment concentrated in sizes 14 through 28. The categories: denim, dress pants, tops, dresses, intimates through the Cacique sub-brand, activewear, outerwear, and a small accessory and shoe assortment. The Cacique intimates business was launched as an in-house Lane Bryant brand in 1996 and has been the most consistent profit engine inside the company for the last two decades. The brand operates around 540 stores in the US today, down from a peak of roughly 800 in the early 2010s, plus the lanebryant.com direct channel which has grown into the larger of the two.

The price tier is mid-market. Signature denim runs roughly $70 to $90 at full price and frequently lands in the $40s on promotion. Dress pants are in the $60 to $90 range. The Cacique full-coverage bras start around $42 and run to about $65, with sister sizes through 40H and beyond in select fits. The bra-fitting program has been one of the brand’s quiet competitive advantages for decades – the in-store associates are genuinely trained on the bra fits, and the assortment includes back sizes (40, 42, 44, 46) and cup sizes (G, H, I) that most mainstream lingerie brands still do not stock.

Distribution is direct – the brand’s own stores plus lanebryant.com. Lane Bryant does not wholesale into department stores in any meaningful way, which distinguishes it from newer plus-size labels that route through Nordstrom or Macy’s. The trade-off: it controls the shopping experience end to end but bears the full cost of the physical footprint, which is the variable that has driven most of its restructuring drama over the last fifteen years.

Where the brand gets it right

Start with the bras. Cacique remains the deepest plus-size bra assortment under one roof in American retail. The brand fits up through a 44H in several core styles and stocks the bandeaus, the racerback convertibles, and the no-wire balconettes that women in the 38-46 band range cannot easily find at Victoria’s Secret or ThirdLove. The fitting service is free, the associates are trained, and the return policy is generous. It is the part of the business hardest for any newer entrant to replicate, because the back-and-cup-size assortment requires an inventory commitment DTC brands struggle to fund.

The denim fit grading is the second strength. The block has been refined over decades and the result is one of the few mid-market plus-size denims that grades proportionally through size 28 without losing the waist-to-hip ratio. The Skinny, Boyfriend, and Wide Leg blocks all sit on a real waistband rather than the rolled-elastic compromise a lot of brands at this price point default to. Not as flattering as Universal Standard‘s higher-priced denim, but at half the price it is doing real work.

The third strength is store accessibility. 540 physical locations means a plus-size woman in a mid-sized American city can walk into a store, try on jeans in size 22, try a bra in 42DD, and walk out with both. Eloquii is largely DTC. Universal Standard has a small store footprint. Torrid has stores but at a different price point and aesthetic. For the woman who wants to physically try things on in her size, Lane Bryant is still the largest game in the country.

The fourth: the brand has stayed honest about who it dresses. Lane Bryant’s marketing for the past decade has used plus-size models from the actual size range it serves. The “I’m No Angel” campaign in 2015, the Plus is Equal industry push in 2016, the ongoing campaign work with models like Ashley Graham and Precious Lee – all of it has kept the brand visually anchored to its customer in a way the major department stores have never managed.

Where there is room

The product design has been cautious. For most of the 2010s, the assortment leaned on workwear staples, classic dresses, and bootcut denim – safe pieces for a customer the brand assumed wanted to blend in. The result is that Lane Bryant ceded the editorial, trend-forward plus-size space to Eloquii and the higher-fashion designer capsules. The brand is now playing catch-up on the silhouettes that have defined plus-size fashion over the past five years: the wide-leg trouser, the architectural blazer, the corseted bodice dress, the slip skirt. The 2024 and 2025 collections have pushed into this territory, but the brand is still working against a reputation for being the place your aunt bought her dress pants.

The store experience varies wildly by location. Some stores are well-merchandised, well-staffed, properly lit. Others, more common in secondary mall locations, feel underfunded, with stale visual merchandising and limited size depth on the floor. The brand has been closing the weakest locations for several years, but a shopper’s first impression still depends heavily on which mall she walks into.

Pricing on certain core categories has crept higher than it should be for the quality tier. A non-denim dress pant at $90 sits in the same range as Universal Standard‘s wide-leg trouser, which is cut and constructed at a noticeably higher quality level. The brand has not always justified the mid-market pricing with mid-market product, and the gap shows up most clearly in the woven tops and lighter-weight knits.

The ownership eras that shaped what the brand is now

The 121-year ownership chart is essential context. Lena Himmelstein Bryant Malsin and her family ran the company until 1982, when the Malsins sold Lane Bryant to The Limited, Inc., the Leslie Wexner conglomerate that also owned Victoria’s Secret and Express at various points. The Limited held Lane Bryant for nineteen years and grew the store footprint substantially but is widely viewed as having under-invested in the plus-size product itself, treating it as a steady cash generator rather than a brand to develop.

In 2001 The Limited sold Lane Bryant to Charming Shoppes, the Pennsylvania-based plus-size conglomerate that also owned Fashion Bug and Catherines. The Charming Shoppes era built Cacique into a real franchise and pushed the store count to its peak. It is also the era that turned Lane Bryant into a meaningful piece of the plus-size retail establishment.

In 2012 Ascena Retail Group, the publicly traded specialty conglomerate that already owned Ann Taylor, Loft, and Justice, acquired Charming Shoppes for about $890 million and folded Lane Bryant into the portfolio. The Ascena era is the troubled stretch most plus-size shoppers remember. Ascena over-leveraged itself across too many brands, mismanaged the merchandising disciplines that had made Charming effective, and entered bankruptcy in 2020.

Lane Bryant came out of the Ascena bankruptcy in late 2020 when private equity firm Sycamore Partners acquired it along with Catherines and a couple of other Ascena assets. In 2024 Sycamore restructured the business again, closing additional underperforming stores and re-investing in digital. The brand operates today as part of Premium Apparel LLC, the Sycamore holding entity that also owns Loft and Ann Taylor. The ownership history explains why the brand has had stretches of brilliance and stretches of drift – it has been pulled between strategies by ownership groups with different priorities for over four decades.

What to buy from them

If you are walking into Lane Bryant for the first time or coming back after a few years away, the assortment to actually engage with is narrower than the catalog suggests. Five categories where the brand is still doing its best work:

The Cacique No-Wire Bra at around $52 is the bra I recommend to anyone in a 38-46 band size who has given up on wire bras after years of underwire poking. The fit through the 42 and 44 bands is the best I have tried in this category, and the back closure has three hook columns rather than the two most brands stop at. Worth the trip into a physical store for a fitting.

The Signature Fit Skinny Jean at around $80 is the denim that earns its place. The waistband is real, the rise is high enough to actually stay up, and the grading through 18, 20, 22 is proportional rather than tapered-to-cylinder. I size down a half-size in this style because the waistband stretches over the first three wears.

The Wide Leg Trouser at around $90 is the dress pant the brand has finally gotten right after years of bootcut-only assortments. The drape is closer to a proper trouser than to a stretch pant, the back darts grade through size 28, and the inseam options include a true Petite at 28 inches. Order one length up from your usual and have it hemmed if you wear flats.

The Cacique Cotton Fit Panty 5-Pack at around $40 is the underwear most plus-size women I know rotate through. The leg openings sit flat without rolling and the cotton-modal blend washes consistently through hundreds of cycles. Buy three packs, throw out the rest of your drawer.

The Cacique T-Shirt Bra Balconette at around $58 is the wired option for the days when you want lift and structure under a fitted top. The cup grading through the H range is the part most other brands skip, and Cacique’s fit through 40H specifically is one of the few options at this price point.

Why this 120-year history actually matters

It is tempting to read this story as nostalgic – 121 years, the immigrant founder, the family origin. The more useful read is that Lane Bryant is the case study for what happens to a category-defining brand when the rest of the industry catches up. The Malsins built the plus-size department store in 1923 because no one else would. For the next sixty years, Lane Bryant had the category to itself. From the 1980s onward the rest of the industry started entering – first the mass chains, then Torrid and Eloquii, then the DTC entrants like Universal Standard, then the designer capsules.

The answer the brand keeps arriving at – bras, denim, store accessibility, real plus-size casting – is defensible. None of those four things is easy to replicate. The bra assortment is an inventory commitment most brands cannot fund. The denim grading is decades of fit-block work. The store footprint is a real-estate position newer brands have not built. The casting is editorial discipline earned by serving this customer for a century. Where the brand has lost ground is trend-forward product design and the editorial energy newer labels have brought to plus fashion. That is fixable. Whether the Sycamore-era turnaround sticks is the question worth watching over the next three to five years.

I bought the Wide Leg Trouser in a size 18 in the longer inseam at $90 from lanebryant.com last month. First Lane Bryant pant I have owned in roughly six years. Not the equal of my Universal Standard wide-leg, but closer than I expected, and at this price tier that is the more relevant comparison. The link is below.

May 27, 2026
How Betsie Larkin Built Honeylove Into the Third Name in Shapewear

Walk into any Nordstrom intimates floor in 2026 and the shapewear wall used to be a two-name conversation. Spanx on one end, Skims on the other, and a scatter of smaller labels in between that nobody asked the associate about. That has shifted. The Honeylove section now sits at eye level between the two giants in most full-line stores, the packaging in the soft cream-and-black palette that the brand has held since launch, and the associates have actually been trained on the difference between a SuperPower short and a Skims Sculpting one. Eight years after Betsie Larkin started prototyping the first piece in her apartment, Honeylove has become the third name customers walk in asking for by brand.

This piece is about how that happened. What Larkin built, what the brand executes better than its bigger competitors, where it still falls short, and why it is worth paying attention to as a plus-size customer specifically. The shapewear category had calcified around two brands with very different theories of compression – Spanx tight enough to redistribute, Skims smoother and softer with less hold – and Honeylove arrived with a third theory. Structural, engineering-led, designed not to roll. The proposition is narrow. The execution has been disciplined. The brand has held that focus across nearly every product launch since 2018.

The founder who could not find a piece that stayed put

Betsie Larkin is not a celebrity founder. She does not have a styling rolodex, did not come out of a Calabasas product-development pipeline, did not have her name on a fashion-house letterhead before she launched. She was a singer-songwriter in the electronic-dance space in the mid-2010s, performing in fitted stage outfits regularly, and her actual founding story is the one shapewear customers know in their bodies. The pieces rolled down. The waistbands cut. The bodysuits dug into the shoulders. The compression that promised to smooth was actually creating a different silhouette problem two inches above the original one. She tried everything in the category that existed at the time, and the gap she experienced was the gap a lot of women experienced and accepted as the cost of wearing shapewear at all.

Larkin spent her own savings working with a patternmaker and a small contract factory to prototype a short that would not roll. The breakthrough was a bonded silicone-and-fabric waistband construction that the brand calls the Liftwear waistband – a wide, structured band that grips against the skin without the elastic memory that causes rollover. The first product launched on the Honeylove site in 2018 with no traditional retail partner, no PR push, and a marketing budget that consisted of Instagram ads and a single founder-led story. The product sold out within weeks of the early influencer pickup and the brand has been chasing its own production capacity for most of the years since.

The reason the founding story matters for the brand identity is the same reason it matters for the product: Larkin was solving a problem she had personally lived inside, and the discipline of that problem-solving shows up in every product the brand has launched since. Honeylove does not chase trend-of-the-moment ingredients or fabrics. The brand has stayed inside a narrow product corpus – shaping shorts, bodysuits, briefs, leggings, bras – and refined that corpus across iterations rather than sprawling into adjacent categories. That is unusual restraint in a venture-backed direct-to-consumer brand, and the restraint is the founder’s fingerprint.

What the brand actually sells

Honeylove sits squarely in the shaping category. The brand does not make outerwear, lounge, swim, or sleep. The product range is built around a core idea of structured shaping that does not roll, and every silhouette in the line is engineered around the same waistband and panel construction. The hero categories: shaping shorts and briefs, sculpting bodysuits, shaping leggings, shaping bras, and a small set of slip dresses and tank pieces.

The sizing range goes from XS through 3XL across most of the core line, which lands at roughly a US size 22 to 24 depending on the cut. That is wider than where Skims started in 2019 but narrower than Universal Standard’s full range. For plus-size customers above a 24, the brand still has work to do, and I want to flag that upfront because the marketing language sometimes implies a broader range than the actual product grading delivers. The price tier sits between Spanx and Skims for direct comparison pieces – shaping shorts at roughly $70 to $80, bodysuits at $90 to $130, the leggings at $90, the bras at $60 to $80. Distribution today: honeylove.com direct, Nordstrom in-store and online, Amazon for a curated set of styles, and Macy’s at select doors.

Where the brand gets it right

The first thing Honeylove got right is the waistband problem they originally set out to solve. The Liftwear band on the SuperPower short and the Crossover short genuinely does not roll on most body shapes through most of a wearing day. I have worn the SuperPower in a size 2X under a fitted knit dress for a six-hour event and the band sat where I put it at the start of the night. Spanx Suit Yourself in the same wearing scenario migrates downward by about an inch over the same window, in my experience, and Skims Sculpting Shorts sit lower to begin with and ride up at the thigh. The waistband is the thing the brand built itself around, and it works.

The second is the panel construction across the bodysuits. The brand uses what they call a Sculptlace or patterned-mesh panel through the torso of the sculpting bodysuits, which compresses without creating the smooth-but-stiff feeling of older-generation Spanx, and without the slipperier, softer compression of Skims that smooths more than it shapes. The panel is structured. It holds. For a plus-size body where the goal is genuine redistribution rather than just smoothing, the Honeylove construction does more actual work. The trade-off is breathability, which I will get to in the cons section.

The third is the discipline around the product line. Honeylove launches roughly three to five new silhouettes per year, with each launch building on the existing engineering rather than chasing a new fabric trend. The 2022 leggings extension, the 2023 bra range, the 2024 slip dresses – all sit inside the same construction philosophy as the original shorts. The brand has not done a beauty extension, a swim extension, or an athleisure extension despite the obvious commercial pull to do so. That focus is rare for a venture-backed DTC label past year five.

The fourth is the customer-experience layer that often gets overlooked. Honeylove offers a 100-day return window on most pieces – longer than Spanx, longer than Skims, comparable to Universal Standard’s 60-day window. The pieces are returnable worn, which matters in shapewear because the actual question is whether the silhouette works under your actual clothes, which you cannot test in the dressing room with the tags still on. The return policy is the kind of thing that signals real confidence in the product, and the brand has held it across all of its retail expansion.

Where the brand has room

Honest critique. The price ceiling is a real friction point. At $130 for the V-Neck Shaping Bodysuit, Honeylove is the most expensive of the three names in the standard shapewear conversation. Spanx Suit Yourself at $98 and Skims Sculpting at $78 both do related work for materially less money. The Honeylove construction is better-engineered, but “better-engineered at 30 to 60 percent more” is a math each customer has to do for herself. I think the bodysuits earn it for the right occasion. I am less convinced the basic shaping shorts earn it when the Spanx and Skims options are within a few percentage points of the same outcome.

The breathability is the structural trade-off I mentioned earlier. The Sculptlace and patterned-mesh panels that deliver the structured compression also retain heat more than the lighter Skims fabrications. In a sit-down setting that is fine. For a long event in a warm room or any kind of summer wedding in the South, the bodysuit gets noticeable. This is the cost of the structured panel doing real work, but it is a cost worth naming.

The sizing range above a 22 or 24 is the third gap. The brand markets itself as size-inclusive and the language sometimes implies a wider range than the grading delivers. Pieces in the 3XL grade do not always sit cleanly on bodies above a 24, and the bra range has a narrower band-and-cup matrix than specialty fit brands like Elomi or Cuup. For customers above a 26, the brand is not quite there yet, and that is worth knowing before you place an order.

How it lines up against the rest of the category

Honeylove does not exist in a vacuum. The shapewear category has three serious contenders in 2026, and the choice between them is not arbitrary.

Spanx is the original. Founded by Sara Blakely in 2000, the brand still owns the institutional retail relationships and the broader product range that Honeylove does not have. Spanx Suit Yourself is the bodysuit most associates will hand you first. The fit is consistent. The compression is firm. The cut runs slightly small through the bust on most bodies, and the leg openings can leave a visible line under thinner fabrics. Spanx is the safe choice for the customer who wants the brand the rest of her wardrobe is already paired with. The trade-off is that the product engineering has not moved as far in the last five years as the newer brands have.

Skims is the second name and the softer-feeling option. Founded by Kim Kardashian in 2019 and now sized through the broadest commercial color range in the category, Skims Sculpting and Skims Fits Everybody are the right choice for the customer whose priority is smoothing and a barely-there feel rather than structural redistribution. The pricing sits below Honeylove on most direct comparison pieces. The compression is genuinely softer. Plus-size customers above a 22 will find the Skims range more reliable than the Honeylove grading, which is the trade-off in the other direction.

The honest read: if your priority is the bodysuit that will not roll and will actually hold under a fitted dress, Honeylove is the pick. If your priority is the smoother, softer, lower-compression smoothing layer for a casual lean, Skims wins on price and feel. If your priority is buying inside an institutional brand with the widest retail footprint, Spanx is still the default. Three different problems, three different right answers.

What to buy from them

If you are buying Honeylove for the first time, do not buy the full system. The smart move is to test the brand on one piece that matches the silhouette problem you are actually trying to solve. The pieces I would put on a first order, in priority order:

The Honeylove SuperPower Short at around $72 is the foundation piece and the one I would buy first. The Liftwear waistband holds through a wearing day in a 2X, the leg openings sit at mid-thigh without rolling up, and the compression is firm without bruising. This is the piece that earned the brand its reputation and it remains the strongest item in the lineup.

The V-Neck Shaping Bodysuit at around $128 is the bodysuit I would recommend for a fitted-dress occasion specifically. Run it under a knit midi or a silk slip and the silhouette holds without the typical bodysuit migration at the shoulder seam. Worth the price point if you have a real wear occasion. Probably not worth it as a daily basic.

The Crossover Short at around $68 is the lower-waist alternative to the SuperPower for outfits that need a piece sitting below the natural waist. The construction is the same Liftwear band in a different cut. This is the right pick for high-rise pants or skirts that sit at the hip rather than the waist.

The Silhouette Bra at around $78 is the brand’s strongest bra and works as a layering piece under bodysuits or as a smoothing layer in its own right. The band runs true to size, the cup grading is consistent up through the larger sizes the line carries, and the construction is more structured than the Skims Fits Everybody bras at a similar price point.

The Shaping Legging at around $90 is the piece I am most mixed on but the one I keep returning to in colder months. The compression sits through the leg without bunching at the knee, which is the failure most shaping leggings hit, and the waistband holds the way the brand’s shorts do. Buy this one if leggings are a real part of your rotation. Skip if not.

Why this brand matters in the broader shapewear conversation

Honeylove is worth paying attention to because of what it proved about the shapewear category. The accepted wisdom in 2018 was that the category was mature, that Spanx owned the institutional buyer and Skims would take the next-generation customer, and that there was no room for a third name to mean anything. Larkin’s brand is the counter-evidence. By holding to a narrow product corpus, solving a specific engineering problem, and refusing to sprawl into adjacent categories, Honeylove built a third position in a category that was supposed to be a two-brand race.

For the plus-size customer in particular, this matters because the rise of a third name with structural compression as its core proposition opens up a meaningful option that did not exist seven years ago. Plus-size bodies often need redistribution more than smoothing, and the brand that built its waistband around that distinction is doing real work the older two brands had not prioritized. Honeylove is not perfect, and the price ceiling and the sizing gap above 24 are both real. But the brand has earned its shelf space at Nordstrom. I am wearing the SuperPower short in a 2X under a Christopher John Rogers knit dress to a wedding in two weeks. The link is below.

May 24, 2026
What to Wear for an Interview Plus-Size: 7 Outfits by Format

After three years of covering interview dressing for plus-size readers – and a separate decade in editorial rooms watching how candidates get read in the hallway before they open their mouths – the question I get most is not “what should I wear” but “what should I wear for this specific format.” A Zoom first-round and a four-hour onsite panel are not the same outfit problem. Neither is the lunch interview, the second-round team meeting, or the final-round conversation with a CEO who has already decided you can do the job and is checking whether you read as someone they want at the table. Industry helps, but format dictates fabric, fit, and which pieces actually do the work.

This breakdown moves through seven interview formats you will plausibly encounter between now and end of year. Each section names an anchor outfit, the specific pieces by retailer and price tier, and the styling note that separates a candidate who dressed for the format from one who dressed for “an interview, generally.” Prices are mid-2026 retail.

What to consider before the format conversation

Three variables sit above format and shape every outfit decision after them. The first is the visible self-presentation of the people already in the role. Pull the company’s LinkedIn, find three current employees at your target level, and look at the team page or any public talk footage. A team that shows up in soft knits and clean denim wants a different read than a team in structured suiting. Match the room, then add one degree of polish above it.

The second is duration. A 30-minute Zoom needs to nail the camera frame from sternum up. A six-hour onsite panel needs to hold shape through three conference rooms, a building tour, and a coffee that gets spilled by hour four. Silk crepe and structured ponte both photograph well, but only one survives a full day in a fluorescent-lit room without bagging at the seat.

The third is the camera test. Most plus-size interview dressing fails the camera test, not the in-person one. A pattern that reads subtle in the mirror photographs as visual noise under flat office light. A pastel that looks soft in daylight goes washed-out under fluorescents. Jewel tones and saturated darks photograph cleanly across lighting conditions. Photograph the outfit under your home overhead light before you wear it anywhere that matters.

1. Phone screen – the comfort outfit that primes your voice

Phone screens are the only interview format where what you wear does not directly affect the outcome. What it does affect is your posture, your breath, and the tone of voice that comes out of you. I have done phone screens in pajamas and they were worse interviews than the ones I did in tailored separates I did not need to wear. Get dressed for the call. Not formal, but deliberately.

The anchor outfit: a fitted ponte knit top and a wide-leg trouser in a fabric with structure. The Universal Standard fitted ponte crewneck in black, around $98, paired with the Eloquii High-Rise Wide-Leg Trouser in charcoal, around $129, sized through 28. Sit at a desk, feet on the floor, both hands free for notes. The ponte does not constrict the diaphragm the way a stiff button-down does, which is the actual reason phone-screen outfits matter for plus-size candidates with full busts. Constriction at the rib cage shortens your breath, which compresses your speaking range. Wear something that lets you breathe deep enough to sound calm.

2. Zoom or video first round – the sternum-up outfit

The video interview is the format where plus-size candidates are most often misadvised. The standard advice is “dress as you would in person from the waist up,” which ignores the camera framing entirely. The camera sees from mid-chest to the top of your head. Everything from the bust up needs to photograph cleanly under whatever room light you have, and nothing below the rib cage matters except your posture.

The anchor piece: the Universal Standard silk-blend blouse in sapphire or emerald, around $148, sized 00-40. A saturated jewel tone in a fabric with subtle sheen photographs as polished without picking up patterns or shadows that flatten under webcam compression. Pair with a fine gold chain that sits at the collarbone and small gold studs. Skip statement earrings on Zoom – they pull focus from your face. For the bottom half, wear whatever you can sit comfortably in for 45 minutes. Nobody is going to see it, but a too-tight waistband will make you shift, and the camera reads shifting as nervous.

3. In-office single first round – the polished one-piece

The 45-minute in-office first round is the most-common interview format in 2026, and it rewards the one-piece outfit decision. A dress carries the look on its own, removes the question of whether your separates read as cohesive, and lets you focus on the conversation instead of adjusting a tucked shell every time you sit down. For plus-size bodies, the right fabric is the entire game – a ponte knit or a structured crepe will sit cleanly through a 45-minute conversation, while a thin jersey will start to ride and bag almost immediately.

The anchor piece: the Eloquii Ponte Knit Sheath Dress in burgundy or deep teal, around $109, sized through 28. The ponte fabric has a memory that holds shape across sitting, standing, and the building walk to the conference room. Layer with an unstructured blazer in cream or camel if the season calls for it. Pair with a closed-toe block-heel pump from Naturalizer in wide width , around $110, and a structured shoulder tote in black or cognac leather. The dress does the heavy lifting; the accessories stay quiet.

4. Full panel day – the all-day endurance outfit

The four-to-six hour onsite panel is the format where most interview outfits fail. The fabric does not hold, the shoes start to ache by the second conference room, the layers that looked sharp in the morning go limp by lunch. The panel outfit is an engineering problem first and a styling problem second. Choose pieces that perform across temperature swings, three different rooms, the building tour, and the inevitable spilled water.

The anchor pieces: the Universal Standard Stephanie Blazer in navy, around $180, paired with a matching wide-leg trouser around $128, both sized through 40. The shoulder construction sits cleanly without padding bulk, and the ponte-adjacent fabric handles a full day without going wrinkled at the elbow. Shell underneath: a fitted silk-blend in cream or pale blue, no pattern. Shoes: a low block-heel from Cole Haan in wide width , around $150, broken in over at least four short wears before the panel. Bag: a structured leather tote large enough for a laptop, water, a backup pair of tights, and a snack you will absolutely need by hour three. The whole look is built for stamina.

5. Lunch interview – the dress that handles a fork

The lunch interview is the most-underrated trap in the format menu. You are eating in front of strangers who are evaluating you, often at a restaurant they chose specifically because the dining room is loud and you will need to lean in to be heard. The outfit needs to read polished, survive a soup spoon, and let you reach across a table without your blouse pulling at the bust. The wrong fabric here is any silk shell with a delicate hem and any white or cream piece anywhere within reach of marinara.

The anchor piece: a knit twinset, which is the most-undervalued plus-size workwear piece of the last five years. The Universal Standard merino shell and cardigan set in oxblood or charcoal, around $200 for the pair, sized 00-40. The fine-gauge merino reads polished, sits cleanly across the bust without gaping, and forgives small spills in a way silk does not. Pair with a wide-leg trouser in dark wash from Eloquii in black , around $129. Shoes: closed-toe loafers from Cole Haan in wide width , around $160. Avoid open-toe styles at lunch – they read too casual against the formality of the meal itself.

6. Second-round team meeting – the considered separates

By the second round you have been told you can do the job and are being evaluated for fit with the team. The outfit should read as one degree more personal than your first-round outfit – still polished, but with a piece that suggests you have taste outside of the interview-uniform conversation. The room will often be more casual than the first round, especially if the team meeting is in their normal working space rather than a conference room. The move is tailored separates with one piece that does the personality work.

The anchor pieces: the Eloquii High-Rise Wide-Leg Trouser in cream or oxblood , around $129, paired with a fine-gauge merino crewneck from Universal Standard in black , around $98. Add one considered outerwear piece – an unstructured trench in olive or camel for a daylight meeting, or a tailored ponte blazer for an indoor afternoon session. Shoes: a leather loafer or a low block-heel mule. Jewelry: one chunky gold ring, gold hoops no larger than a quarter, nothing on the neck. This is the outfit where you can wear something that signals you read fashion editorial, the way Karla Welch or Law Roach style their clients – not as costume, just as evidence that you have a point of view.

7. Final-round executive interview – the quiet statement

The final round with an executive is the only interview format where the outfit should explicitly announce that you understand the level of the conversation. The CEO or SVP across the table is meeting candidates who have already cleared the bar; the meeting is about whether they see you at their table. The dress code is one notch above the rest of the company’s daily uniform, and the silhouette should read as someone comfortable in their authority rather than reaching for it. For a plus-size body, the answer is a column-shaped dress or a tailored sheath in a saturated dark, with deliberate jewelry and the shoes you wear when you know you will be photographed.

The anchor piece: a column sheath in a deep saturated tone – oxblood, sapphire, or charcoal. The Adrianna Papell tailored sheath in deep navy or oxblood, around $189, sized through 24W. Layer with a structured single-breasted blazer in the same color family or a contrasting cream. Shoes: a closed-toe pointed pump from Naturalizer in wide width , around $110. Jewelry: a single statement earring or one substantial cocktail ring, never both. Bag: a small structured top-handle in black or burgundy leather, no laptop tote at this stage. The look reads as decided.

Styling moves that apply across every format

Three rules hold regardless of the format you are dressing for. First, wear actual shapewear under any unlined dress or close-cut trouser. The Honeylove SuperPower Bodysuit at $98 or the Spanx Suit Yourself at $88 will both change how a sheath or a knit dress hangs across the torso. The investment is one piece that improves every interview outfit you own.

Second, take the time to tailor at least the hem and the bust on any dress or jacket that will see more than one wear. A $25 to $40 alteration on a $129 trouser separates a look that reads like ready-to-wear from one that reads like off-the-rack. Find an alterations specialist who has worked with plus-size garments – the difference in how they handle a bust dart versus a generalist tailor is real.

Third, break in any new shoe for at least four short wears before an interview day. The fastest way to undo a carefully built outfit is shoe pain in hour two that has you shifting your weight in every chair you sit in. Wear the shoes around your apartment, around the block, to a coffee shop. Save the interview for the fifth wear minimum.

What to avoid in any interview format

Anything brand-new at the bust. A fitted top you have never worn will pull, gape, or shift in ways you will not anticipate, and you will spend the interview adjusting instead of answering. Wear the top once before the day.

Fragrance strong enough to register at three feet. Office interviews increasingly happen in small rooms with poor ventilation, and a fragrance the interviewer notices is a fragrance they will associate with you. Skip it or use a fraction of what you normally wear.

Patterns that read as visual noise on camera. Small repeating geometric prints, busy florals, and any fine pinstripe go to moire under flat office light or webcam compression. Solid jewel tones and saturated darks photograph more cleanly across every interview setting.

Shoes you are still breaking in. Any shoe with hot spots on day one will have you sitting wrong by the third room of a panel day. Break it in or wear something else.

Shop the looks

The pieces in this guide cluster around three retailers – Universal Standard, Eloquii, and Nordstrom – because those are the brands carrying the strongest plus-size workwear runs in 2026. Universal Standard sizes 00 to 40 and runs the cleanest tailored separates; Eloquii sizes through 28 and runs the strongest dress and trouser construction; Nordstrom carries the third-party pieces (Naturalizer, Cole Haan, Adrianna Papell) that round out the shoe and dress assortment. If you are building an interview rotation, start with a navy blazer and trouser from Universal Standard, a burgundy ponte sheath from Eloquii, and a pointed pump from Naturalizer in wide width. Three pieces handle five of the seven formats above.

Frequently asked questions

Can I wear the same outfit to first and second round at the same company?

Better not. The team often compares notes between rounds and the outfit gets remembered. Switch at least the shell, the jewelry, and the shoes between rounds. A burgundy sheath at first round becomes a cream wide-leg trouser plus knit shell for the second-round team meeting, and the look will read as a different point of view without requiring a second full outfit.

What if my interview spans two days – panel day one, executive day two?

Wear the navy suiting on panel day and the column sheath on executive day. The two looks read as a deliberate range without overlapping. If you can only bring one outfit, default to the navy blazer and trouser – it scales up with a sharper shell and pump for the executive meeting, down with a knit crewneck for the panel.

Are tights mandatory in 2026?

No, but they read more polished than bare legs in any in-office interview between October and April. Choose a sheer black or nude tight that matches your skin tone, not a heavy opaque, and bring a backup pair. A run in the first room with no replacement is the fastest interview-day disaster.

May 23, 2026
Adwoa Beauty’s Founder Story: How Julian Addo Built the Prestige Curl Brand

Adwoa Beauty occupies a specific kind of shelf real estate at Sephora that most Black-founded hair brands have not historically reached. Walk into any flagship Sephora in 2026 and the brand sits in the curl-care wall, not in a partitioned multicultural section, with the signature minimalist packaging running at eye level alongside Briogeo, Bread, and Olaplex. That positioning is the point. Founded by Julian Addo in 2017, Adwoa Beauty arrived at the prestige tier from day one and refused to compete on price – a strategy that almost no other small Black-founded hair brand has been able to execute and survive. The fact that the brand is still on that shelf nine years later, in a category where most independent launches fold within three, is the story worth understanding.

This piece is about how Addo built that. The founder background that produced the brand, the product range that has held the prestige positioning, where the brand earns the placement, and where there is still room. The textured-hair category right now has a small number of brands operating at the price tier above Cantu and below the dermatology-clinic skincare brands, and Adwoa is the brand most often cited as the prestige-tier reference point alongside Pattern. Worth knowing why.

The founder before the brand

Julian Addo is Ghanaian-American. She grew up in the DC area, went to the University of Maryland, and worked in finance and tech before pivoting into beauty. The professional background matters because Adwoa Beauty does not read like a brand built by someone who fell sideways into entrepreneurship – the pricing architecture, the retail-readiness, the formulation patience, all of it has the discipline of someone who spent a decade in operating roles before launching her own thing. Addo named the brand after her own first name in Ghanaian Twi tradition, where Adwoa is the name given to a girl born on a Monday.

The origin story is the one a lot of Black-founded hair brands share but Addo’s version has a different texture. She had her own hair frustrations through her twenties, tried the mainstream natural-hair brands that existed in the mid-2010s, found the formulations either too heavy, too coating, or too generic for her specific texture, and started researching what actual ingredient-forward formulation would require. The version of the story she has told in press interviews emphasizes the years she spent working with chemists before launching – not the moment of inspiration, the slow back-end work of getting the formulations right.

She launched the brand in 2017, direct-to-consumer first, then expanded into Sephora in 2018. That Sephora launch was the inflection point. At the time, the textured-hair shelf at Sephora was thin, and most of the credible Black-founded brands were sitting at Ulta or at mass retailers. Adwoa walking into Sephora at a $24-and-up price tier in 2018 was a positioning decision that signaled the brand was not going to play the volume game. Nine years on, that decision is still paying off.

What the brand actually does

Adwoa Beauty makes hair care for Type 3 and Type 4 curl patterns, with a particular concentration on the wash-day-and-refresh part of the routine. The core line is anchored by the Baomint family – leave-in conditioner, deep conditioner, clay-refresh spray, scalp cleanser – all built around a baobab and peppermint base. There are additional product families around protein treatment, styling cream, and oil, but Baomint is the line the brand is known for and the products most reviewers cite first.

The price tier sits at $24 to $38 for most core products, which is at or slightly above Pattern Beauty and meaningfully above the mass-retailer Black-founded brands. SKU count is intentionally smaller than the major textured-hair brands – roughly fifteen products across the active lineup, versus Pattern’s thirty-plus. That smaller footprint is a strategic choice. Addo has said in interviews that the brand prioritizes formulation depth over line breadth, which translates into a more curated catalog and a longer lead time between new product launches.

Distribution today: Sephora as the anchor retailer (in-store and Sephora.com), adwoabeauty.com direct, and a handful of independent specialty retailers. Not at Ulta, not at Target, not at any mass-grocery. That retail discipline is the operational version of the price discipline and it has kept the brand sitting in the prestige slot rather than getting absorbed into the general curl-care category.

Where the brand gets it right

The first thing Adwoa got right is the Baomint formulation itself. The Baomint Moisturizing Leave-In is the product that built the brand. The texture is lightweight enough to layer under a styler without piling, the slip is enough to detangle on damp hair, and the scent is the specific peppermint-forward note that has become the brand’s olfactory signature. Reviewers who try the leave-in and stay with the brand are usually staying because that one product earned its repurchase, and the rest of the line is built around the credibility of that single SKU.

The second is the visual identity. The packaging is the cleanest in the category. Matte white tubes and bottles, sage-green accent type, no clutter, no oversold marketing copy on the front of the bottle. Most natural-hair brand packaging defaults to busy color-coding and aggressive front-of-label promises. Adwoa’s packaging looks like a Cuup bra box looks – confident enough not to shout. That matters at the prestige tier. When the product is sitting on a Sephora shelf next to a Briogeo bottle and a Bread Beauty Supply tube, the visual restraint reads as expensive and the brand earns the placement.

The third is the founder presence without the founder dependency. Addo is centered in the brand’s narrative without being the entire face of every campaign. She does press, she does interviews, she shows up at Sephora events, but the brand does not require her in every photograph to feel coherent. That balance is structurally healthier than the celebrity-founded brands that collapse the moment the celebrity loses interest, and it is the reason Adwoa has the runway to keep growing without a personality-cult vulnerability.

The fourth is the pace. Adwoa has launched roughly two to three new products per year over its nine-year run, which is well below the industry average and well below what most retailers pressure brands to do. The discipline of resisting the launch-something-every-quarter pressure has kept the line tight and the formulations meaningful rather than performative. The 2021 Blue Tansy Clay-Refresh Spray and the 2023 protein treatment are the two most-cited additions, and both filled real gaps rather than chasing trend ingredients.

Where there is room

Honest critique. The price is the price. At $26 for an 8 oz Baomint Leave-In, Adwoa is genuinely expensive for what is functionally a leave-in conditioner, and the value-per-ounce conversation is real. Cantu’s Sulfate-Free Cleansing Cream at $7 does not do the same thing the Adwoa Cleanser does, but the Mielle leave-in at $12 does most of what the Baomint leave-in does for shoppers who are not chasing the specific texture and scent profile. Adwoa’s argument is that the formulation difference is worth the premium, and for a lot of shoppers that argument lands. For others, the math does not.

Distribution is the other open question. The Sephora-only retail strategy is what made the brand prestige, but it also means that shoppers in markets without a Sephora flagship are functionally locked out of in-store availability. The brand has not expanded into Ulta or any second mass-prestige retailer, and the direct-to-consumer site has had reported shipping and stock-out frustrations in peak seasons. For a brand asking $26 a bottle, the fulfillment experience needs to be consistent and it has not always been.

And the line is still thinner than the routines of some Type 4 shoppers require. Adwoa skews toward the lighter end of the texture spectrum – the formulations are tuned more toward Type 3 and the looser end of Type 4 than toward the densest 4C textures. The Heavy or Extra-Rich category that Pattern has built out does not have a clear Adwoa equivalent, and Type 4C shoppers who try the brand sometimes leave because the products are not heavy enough for their density. The brand could go further into that part of the texture spectrum and has not yet.

How Adwoa fits in the category

Adwoa does not exist in isolation, and the brand’s positioning makes more sense in contrast to the rest of the textured-hair prestige tier. Three reference points worth knowing.

Pattern Beauty is the most direct comparison. Founded by Tracee Ellis Ross and launched at Ulta in 2019, Pattern occupies the same mid-to-prestige price tier with a broader SKU count and a wider distribution footprint. Pattern sits at Ulta and Sephora; Adwoa sits at Sephora only. Pattern has more than thirty products; Adwoa has roughly fifteen. The trade-off: Pattern is the brand to choose if you want a full system from a single line and the security of mass retail availability. Adwoa is the brand to choose if you want a curated, formulation-forward shorter list and you prioritize the specific Baomint texture profile.

Bread Beauty Supply is the other prestige comparison. Founded by Maeva Heim in Australia and launched at Sephora in 2020, Bread sits at a similar price tier and a similar minimalist visual identity. The product range is narrower than Adwoa’s and the formulations are more focused on the wash-and-condition core of the routine. The trade-off: Bread is arguably the cleaner brand experience for shoppers who want a tight three-or-four-product routine. Adwoa is the more developed line if you want refresh products and treatments alongside the core wash.

Mielle Organics is the volume comparison. Founded by Monique Rodriguez in 2014, Mielle sits at the mass-retail tier with broader distribution at Target, Walmart, and Sally Beauty. Most Mielle products are $11 to $18 – meaningfully below Adwoa. The trade-off: Mielle is the cost-effective choice with formulations that work for many shoppers. Adwoa is the precision choice for shoppers who want the formulation discipline and are willing to pay for it.

What to buy from them

If you are coming to Adwoa Beauty for the first time, the move is not to buy the full system. The line is curated enough that one or two pieces will give you a real read on whether the brand is going to fit your routine. Four products worth knowing about.

The Adwoa Baomint Moisturizing Leave-In Conditioner at around $26 for 8 oz is the entry point. This is the product that built the brand and the product most shoppers stay for. Layers under a curl cream without piling, slip is real, and the peppermint-forward scent is the brand signature. If you only buy one Adwoa product, this is the one.

The Adwoa Baomint Deep Conditioner at around $32 for 8 oz is the wash-day treatment. Heavier than the leave-in, slip is strong enough to detangle Type 3 and the looser Type 4 textures, and the deposit is meaningful without coating low-porosity strands. Worth the price if you do a weekly deep treatment as part of your routine.

The Adwoa Blue Tansy Clay-Refresh Spray at around $30 is the day-two and day-three refresh product, and it is the brand’s most distinctive formulation. The clay base reactivates curl pattern without the dampness that water-only refresh sprays leave behind. Niche but loved by the shoppers who use it.

The Adwoa Baomint Curl Defining Gel at around $26 is the styler that holds a wash-and-go without crunch on Types 3A through 4A. For denser 4B and 4C textures the gel reads as too light, but for the texture range it is designed for, the hold is consistent and the second-day pattern stays defined.

And the Adwoa Baomint Scalp Cleanser at around $32 rounds out the wash routine. Cleans without stripping, the peppermint base reads as cooling on the scalp without being aggressive, and the formulation pairs well with the rest of the Baomint family. The fifth purchase if you have already committed to the system.

Why this brand matters

Adwoa Beauty is the case study for what a Black-founded hair brand at the prestige tier can look like when the operator has the patience to build slowly and the discipline to resist the volume-and-discount pressure that the category has historically forced on these brands. The textured-hair shelf at Sephora in 2017 was thin. The textured-hair shelf at Sephora in 2026 is not, and Adwoa is part of the reason. The category opened up because brands like Adwoa, Pattern, and Bread proved that the prestige tier could hold Black-founded hair, and the retailers expanded the shelf to make room.

The lesson for the broader category is structural and worth naming. The brands that will keep winning in textured hair from here forward will not be the ones that try to be everything to every texture at every price point. They will be the ones that pick a position, hold it, build the formulation discipline to earn it, and refuse the pressure to dilute. Julian Addo picked a position in 2017 and has held it for nine years. The receipts are on the Sephora shelf. The Baomint Leave-In, 8 oz, around $26, and the only place it ships from with consistency is Sephora.

May 22, 2026
What to Wear During a Job Interview: 6 Plus-Size Outfits by Industry

I bought my first real interview blazer in 2014 for an editorial assistant role I did not get, and it cost $312 at a sample sale that started at 7am on a Saturday in a SoHo loft with no air conditioning. The blazer was a size 18 navy single-breasted from a designer I will not name because the brand has since changed its sizing in ways that make it irrelevant. I wore it to six interviews over two years before I figured out something obvious – the blazer was doing about 30% of the work I thought it was doing, and the trouser, the shoes, the bag, and the choice not to wear a statement necklace were doing the other 70%. I have since interviewed for editor roles at five publications, sat on the hiring side for two of them, and helped enough friends piece together first-round outfits that I have a clear sense of what reads as “ready” in 2026 versus what reads as “tried.”

This is the breakdown by industry, because the corporate-finance interview outfit that gets you taken seriously at a midtown bank is the same outfit that gets you read as overdressed at a creative agency in Brooklyn. Six industries, one anchor outfit each, with the pieces that actually do the work.

What to consider before you pick the outfit

Three things matter before fit, fabric, or color. The first is the company’s visible dress code. Pull up the company’s LinkedIn, find three employees at your level, and look at how they show up in their profile photos and in any team photos on the company site. If the head of marketing is in a soft cardigan and the engineering lead is in a hoodie, a wool suit will read as misread-the-room. If the people in the team photo are in tailored separates with structured shoulders, your knit dress will read as underdressed.

The second is the format. A four-hour panel with five interviewers in conference rooms is a different physical experience than a 45-minute first-round in a single office. The panel outfit needs to handle sitting in three rooms, walking between them, and getting water spilled by hour three. The first-round outfit can prioritize one-impression polish over endurance.

The third is the photograph. Most companies will photograph you at offer-day onboarding in whatever you wore to the final round, and many will put a candidate photo into a Slack channel before final-round decisions. The outfit you wear should photograph as cleanly in a fluorescent-lit conference room as it does in the mirror at home. Solid jewel tones, structured shoulders, and saturated darks photograph better than fussy patterns or pastels in flat office lighting.

1. Corporate finance, law, or consulting – the tailored suit alternative

Big-firm finance, law, and consulting still default to a matched suit in navy or charcoal for in-office interviews above analyst level. The plus-size version of this dress code is hardest to source because matched suiting in extended sizes is still thin on the ground in 2026, and the most-flattering version is almost never a literal matched two-piece. The move is a structured single-breasted blazer with a tailored wide-leg trouser in the same neutral but not necessarily the same exact fabric weight.

The anchor piece: the Universal Standard Stephanie Blazer in navy , around $180, sized 00-40. The shoulder construction sits cleanly without padding bulk, and the single-button closure reads more updated than a two-button. Pair with the Universal Standard wide-leg trouser in matching navy , around $128, and a closed-toe pointed pump from Naturalizer in wide width , around $110. Shell underneath: a fitted silk or silk-blend in cream or pale blue, no pattern. Bag: a structured shoulder tote in black leather, large enough for a laptop.

2. Creative agency, editorial, or fashion – the considered separates

Creative-industry interviews want to see taste, not compliance. Showing up in a matched corporate suit at a creative agency reads as not understanding the room. The move is tailored separates that read as considered without reading as costume – a structured trouser in an unexpected color or fabric, a silk shell or fine-knit top, a sculptural shoe, and one piece of jewelry that suggests you have personal style without competing with your face for the interviewer’s attention.

The anchor piece: the Eloquii High-Rise Wide-Leg Trouser in cream or oxblood , around $129, sized through 28. Paired with a fine-gauge merino crewneck from Universal Standard in black , around $98. Shoes: a low block-heel mule or a leather loafer rather than a pump. Bag: a soft-structure shoulder bag, ideally in cognac or a deep oxblood. Jewelry: one chunky gold ring, gold hoops no larger than a quarter, nothing on the neck. The whole look reads as someone who knows what Karla Welch puts on her clients without trying to dress like a Karla Welch client.

3. Tech / product / engineering – the structured-casual outfit

Tech interviews have one of the most-misread dress codes in 2026. The default at most major tech companies remains business casual, but the spread between Google headquarters and a Series B startup is wide, and the wrong read in either direction reads as not knowing the industry. The safe baseline is what I call structured-casual – a tailored piece on top, a relaxed piece on bottom, or vice versa, with one clearly considered element that signals intentionality.

The anchor piece: a fitted ponte knit blazer in black or navy from Universal Standard , around $148, paired with a dark-wash straight-leg jean in a clean rinse from Universal Standard’s Seine line , around $98, sized through 40. Underneath: a fitted cotton tee in white or cream, no graphic. Shoes: white leather sneakers in good condition (not running shoes) or a low ankle boot. Bag: a soft leather backpack or a structured tote. The blazer plus dark denim is the formula that reads “I take this seriously” without reading “I do not understand that you wear hoodies here.”

4. Healthcare administration, education, or nonprofit – the knit dress

Healthcare administration, school district leadership, and large nonprofit interviews share a dress-code lane that is more formal than tech but less corporate than finance. The anchor outfit is a knit sheath or fit-and-flare dress in a solid color, layered with a cardigan or unstructured blazer, with closed-toe heels and minimal jewelry. The format is forgiving across a long day of panels and reads as professional without reading as Wall Street.

The anchor piece: the Eloquii Ponte Knit Sheath Dress in burgundy or deep teal , around $109, sized through 28. The ponte fabric holds shape through a full interview day without bagging at the seat after hour three. Layer with an unstructured cardigan in cream or camel from Universal Standard , around $128. Shoes: a closed-toe block-heel pump in nude or black, not pointed-toe, not stiletto. Jewelry: small pearl or gold studs, a thin chain, no statement pieces. Bag: a structured leather tote in black or cognac.

5. Series A or seed-stage startup – the polished founder-coded look

Early-stage startup interviews sit in their own category. The hiring team has probably worked together in a kitchen for the last eight months and the office is somebody’s apartment in Williamsburg. Showing up in a suit reads as misunderstanding the stage of the company. Showing up in athleisure reads as not respecting the interview. The move is the founder-coded look – clean basics, one investment piece, immaculate grooming, nothing precious.

The anchor piece: a high-rise straight-leg trouser in a soft fabric like crepe or wool-blend twill from Eloquii in black , around $109, paired with a fitted ribbed mock-neck in cream or rust from Abercrombie’s Curve Love line , around $50. Shoes: a clean low ankle boot or a leather loafer. Layer: a tailored wool coat or a long cardigan, depending on the season. Bag: a soft leather shoulder bag, not a backpack and not a tote. One leather watch, no other jewelry. The look reads as a person who would be comfortable in a pitch meeting with a partner at Sequoia or in a kitchen interview with the founder’s dog underfoot.

6. Remote / virtual first round – the on-camera outfit

Virtual interviews changed the dressing math because the camera only sees from the chest up, but the rest of you matters for how you sit, how you move, and how you feel for the 45 minutes you are on Zoom. The mistake is dressing only the top half and showing up in pajama bottoms – it changes your posture, your energy, and your read on the camera in ways that are visible to a trained interviewer.

The anchor piece on camera: a fitted silk or silk-blend blouse in a saturated solid color from Universal Standard in emerald or oxblood , around $98. Saturated jewel tones photograph better than pastels on most webcams and read as more confident in low-quality video compression. Underneath the desk: a pull-on ponte pant in the same color family, around $98, or a wide-leg trouser if you have one. Earrings: small gold or pearl studs that catch light without being noisy on a 720p webcam. Hair: pulled back if your hair has more visual texture than your face, down and styled if it does not. Background: solid wall behind you, no kitchen, no bedroom.

Styling tips that apply across every interview type

Three rules hold regardless of industry. The first: tailor everything. A $30 alteration on the blazer sleeves, the trouser hem, or the dress bodice will separate a $150 outfit from one that reads as $400. Find an alterations specialist with plus-size experience before you have an interview scheduled, not after. The good ones get busy and a same-week appointment is hard.

The second: wear actual shapewear under any unlined piece. The Spanx Suit Yourself bodysuit at around $88 or the Honeylove SuperPower at around $98 will transform how a knit dress or a fitted shell hangs across a four-hour panel. Skip the cheap drugstore versions – they roll, bind, and read through the fabric in ways that distract more than they help. This is a one-time investment that improves every interview outfit you own.

The third: break in the shoes. Do not wear new pumps to an interview. Even the Naturalizer wide-width pumps, which run kinder than most, need four to six short wears before they handle a full day. I learned this at an interview at a magazine I will not name when I limped into the fifth-floor walkup in shoes I had bought the day before. I did not get that job, and the shoes were part of the reason.

What to avoid regardless of industry

Anything labeled bodycon, anything in a fabric that wrinkles on contact (linen, low-grade silk, unstructured rayon), and any color that photographs as white in fluorescent office light – which includes pale blush, oyster, ivory, and cream-adjacent yellows. Test by photographing the outfit under your phone’s flash in a windowless bathroom.

Statement jewelry that competes with your face. One pair of small studs, one ring, one watch. That is the upper limit. The interviewer needs to focus on your eyes, your mouth, and your hands. Anything else in their field of vision is friction.

Perfume that announces you before you walk in. Skip it. The interviewer two doors down has migraine triggers and the HR coordinator who walks you out has allergies. Deodorant and clean hair are the right baseline. Save the perfume for the second-round dinner if there is one.

Shop the looks

The pieces in this guide cluster around three retailers – Universal Standard, Eloquii, and Nordstrom – because those carry the strongest size runs and the most reliable fit for plus-size professional wear in 2026. If you are building an interview rotation rather than dressing for a single role, start with one structured blazer and one pair of tailored trousers in a neutral, then build outward with knit dresses, shells, and shoes that work across multiple outfit combinations. The blazer is the highest-leverage purchase in the closet and the one most worth tailoring properly.

Frequently asked questions

What is the safest single outfit if I do not know the industry?

A navy or charcoal single-breasted blazer over a fitted shell in cream or pale blue, paired with a matching or near-matching tailored trouser, a closed-toe pump in black or nude, and minimal jewelry. This reads as competent in finance, professional in healthcare, and acceptable in tech. It will read as slightly overdressed at a creative agency, but slightly overdressed is a safer error than slightly underdressed in any interview context.

Can I wear pants instead of a dress to a corporate interview?

Yes, and a tailored wide-leg or straight-leg trouser in a solid neutral often photographs better than a dress for plus-size bodies in conference-room lighting. The pant suit lost its “men’s clothing” connotation about fifteen years ago and currently reads as more updated than a sheath dress in most corporate environments. The exception is healthcare administration, where knit dresses still slightly dominate the dress code.

How do I dress for a four-hour panel without looking wilted by hour three?

Fabric choice does most of the work. A ponte knit, a wool-blend crepe, or a heavier silk-blend will hold shape through a full day. Avoid pure linen, low-grade rayon, and unlined cotton. Wear shapewear under unlined pieces. Bring a small spare item in your bag – a fresh pair of sheer hosiery, a roll-on antiperspirant, a lipstick – and use the bathroom between rooms two and three for a 90-second reset.

May 18, 2026