Tall Girls Deserve Natural Fibers, Too

“I’ve gone inclusive. I tried to design for everyone: all genders, non-binary, everything. And I designed myself out of it.”

I get pitches from small new brands all the time. I usually decline, because I want to see how the brand does before featuring them. Does it survive for more than one season, and does it have more than five pieces?

But then I got a pitch from an experienced designer who has a recently-relaunched her brand Herderin as “length-conscious” for tall women. Alix Vasquez is an adjunct professor of sociology at the University of San Francisco examining “how material resources—clothing, design objects, aesthetic presentation—become essential infrastructure for professional identity under precarious capitalism.”

“The 25 million U.S. women over 5’9” face an impossible choice,” she wrote. “Sustainable fashion brands—the ones more likely to avoid the petroleum-based dyes and unregulated finishes you document—rarely offer tall sizing. Meanwhile, fast fashion dominates tall sizing precisely because its industrial scale and cost-cutting make size inclusivity financially viable. This means tall women are systematically pushed toward the most chemically problematic segment of the industry. We can’t “vote with our dollars” for non-toxic fashion if no one makes it in our size.

“I spent seven years developing Herderin specifically to address this gap—using Climate Beneficial certified fibers and plant-based dyes from Fibershed‘s network. But I’ve hit against every challenge you’d expect: plant-based dyes are inconsistent, more expensive, require different expertise, and test the limits of what small-scale manufacturing can achieve for an underserved market.”

Her ideas and her experience in designing and sourcing sustainable materials were so compelling, that I had to find out more. (Even though I’m 5’2”!) No matter your height or size, I think you will find it a really interesting conversation about body image, natural fibers, and pursuing our dreams, especially for those of you in the fashion industry. What follows is our conversation, edited for length and clarity.

Alden: Okay, so let’s just start with the basics. How did you get started in fashion design?

Alix: I have been making clothing since 2012, when I started my PhD in sociology at Brandeis University in Boston. With Harvard nearby, the academic environment there was very stressful. Coming from Virginia, I was like, Oh, you have to dress like a PhD student. I knew of a girl who was like 5’7” who had a personal stylist from J Crew. I’m six feet tall, almost 6’1”. And I remember going shopping and I couldn’t find things that really fit me. I think I found, like, one top with a Peter Pan collar that was wool. I thought it made me look smart, but all of my pants were too short. I remember having to go to this British fast fashion brand, Top Shop. The pants were made out of, like, acrylic, polyester. And I just thought, whatever, they fit me.

Alden: What size body is the standard fashion made for?

Alix: The industry standard for making pants starts at the 5’4” frame. If you have a tall inclusive line, like The Gap or Banana Republic, you would then adapt that pattern to elongate it. You would make the inseam longer, but not the waist. They don’t account for the fact that there’s so many parts of the body—the shoulders, the arm length, the torso, the back width, the chest width—it should start from a whole different pattern altogether for tall sizing.

My partner at the time got me my first sewing machine. So that first semester, I started making my own clothes. There’s a whole story there: learning about my body and being comfortable in my body as a tall woman, and big in general. So I had a lot of healing around how I show up in the world and not wanting to stand out.