Name: Farin Weinger
Social Justice Group: 2018-2019, Sexualization of Women in Fashion
Date of Fieldwork: January 15, 2019
Name of Organization: Tibi
Person (people) with whom I met and their job titles: Amy Smilovic, Founder of Tibi
Type of Fieldwork: Interview
What I did:
We went to Tibi’s New York office to interview their founder, Amy Smilovic.
What I learned:
I learned about the business aspect of running a fashion line, and how that can stop you from adding more “plus size” sizes. Ms. Smilovic actually said that the demand was more in the smaller sizes, and that they had to react to demand. She stated that size 2 was the most popular size in Tibi. It followed by 0, 4, 00, 6, 8, 10, 12. That is odd because most Americans are over a size 16, but 20% of their sales is in Asia which has generally more petite figures. Although, this may stop some from feeling comfortable with Tibi’s brand it helped us learn more about the business aspects in a company. Ms. Smilovic also mentioned that even though the more expensive brands let less people buy from them it can benefit the workers. If the garment bought costs more the cut of the money that the manufacturers get is larger, so that ends up helping them.
What I learned about Social Justice “work” and/or Civil and Human rights “work” from this fieldwork:
Through the fieldwork I learned that there are more reasons than ignorance that stop “plus size” and transgender models from modeling brands. Although, there are a lot of brands that don’t feature models that are not straight size because of prejudiced there are other reasons. Some of those reasons are demand or lack of funds. It is important that the brands that end up following those societal rules try to make baby steps. Something that Ms. Smilovic said is that when one of her products gets a lot of demand she adds another size to it. She also said that she would like to have “plus size” models to model her clothes, but she is waiting to be able to back it up with actual clothes for “plus size” people. I believe that is the right way to represent people who aren’t straight size, and to be able to back up their claims is very important.
