I learned about the tragedy of the commons in a college sociology class, but I didn’t understand it on a spiritual level until I moved to New York City and lived with roommates from Craigslist.

If your major was one in which you learned how to make money instead of learning how humans treat each other and the world poorly, the tragedy of the commons comes into play when humans choose to act in their own limited sense of self-interest instead of in the common good. People are often bad at imagining themselves as a member of the group that would ultimately benefit from the common good, which means scenarios in which a group shares resources become depleted or unkempt as individuals extract what they want and fail to do the work necessary to maintain them.

The best middle-class American example of the tragedy of the commons is probably any workplace’s shared break room refrigerator, but the dynamic extends to private spaces too. Because of high housing costs and the large number of young transplants who move to the city, NYC is full of individuals in living situations where they don’t feel particularly bound to their roommates, the upkeep of their shared spaces, or the group’s shared interests. It’s a million little tragic commonses.

For the six years I did it, the Craigslist roommate experience was mostly fine — everyone washed their dishes in a reasonable amount of time, and we were all mostly deferential to the other shared indignities of living with humans whose shower schedules don’t always line up with your own. The only place this cooperation consistently broke down was the kitchen trash can, an area of such mutual disgust across apartments and roommate configurations that eventually I tried to avoid being home on trash night so I could eschew extended physical interaction with the trash can, a move I copied from one of my other roommates.

That’s how the commons becomes tragic, of course — we acted in our own situational self-interest, which meant avoiding the trash entirely in hopes that someone else would take care of it, and then no one did. Even when one of us eventually got fed up and bought a new can, which happened a couple of times, the situation would deteriorate again quickly. Cheap plastic trash cans, with their stamped texture and lids you have to physically open with your hands in the middle of cleaning raw chicken, just want to be grimy.

That’s how, after the better part of a decade spent trying to toss open crusty lids with only my pinky finger, spending $130 on a trash can sounded like a thing I might reasonably do in order to buy my way out of that experience and into a product that promised never to become gross.

The trash can in question is the Simplehuman 45-liter step-open model, and given that American trash bags are usually sized in quarts or gallons, you already know it’s fancy. The occasion of its potential purchase was the acquisition of my own apartment — at 31 years old, I had managed to raise my freelance writing rates enough that, on top of the salary from my full-time job, I could afford to live by myself, in a real one-bedroom apartment near the Brooklyn bagel shop I already liked. The New York Dream: No Trust Fund Edition.

My apartment was one of the rare, unblemished steps forward that come around less frequently as you transition from young adulthood to the more stable and regular kind, but it also required me to acknowledge that I had probably peaked, in New York real estate terms. I wouldn’t want to be doing anything else with my life, but writing’s ability to move me into ever-nicer apartments is based mostly on luck and timing beyond this point in my career, and my willingness to spend more time imagining a future based on good luck and good timing is slim.

What I have is the best of what I’m likely to ever have, which is a jarring thing to admit to yourself in a culture that raises children on the myth that we can all be fabulously wealthy one day, if only we apply ourselves. I have applied myself, and where I am is in my own modest apartment in New York City, which I am almost unfathomably lucky to be able to afford, above and beyond any work I’ve done to get here. It would probably be wiser to still have the roommates, to still pay rent on a bedroom instead of a whole place, to put that extra money into saving for some kind of grand but presently indeterminate future that I will theoretically have with a theoretical house and maybe a theoretical husband, sometime before the seas rise up and kill us all.

It’s hard for me to look around at the world in 2018, to look at all the malevolent things about it that I can’t control but that can control me, and feel like playing that game is something more than rearranging the deck chairs on my own personal Titanic. It’s hard to imagine what putting $130 in my savings account instead of putting it out into the world could possibly do to help solve any of the big, intractable problems that are more worrisome and probably more immediate than my own retirement. So fuck it, I bought the trash can. The future I’d be saving for seems increasingly unlikely, and putting little bits of money aside seems like an increasingly futile way to deal with the future that is coming, but garbage day never ends.

My Simplehuman is most widely available in silver-finished stainless steel, which I found compelling enough even without looking into other options, or considering that other options might exist — it’s a stainless steel trash can, of course it’s silver. When I mentioned my love for this ridiculous thing on Twitter, though, a friend asked if I was getting the rose gold version. Even before my fingers could type “rose gold trash can” into Google, I knew that yes, of course, I was getting the rose gold version. I would die without the rose gold trash can, which I had not known existed four seconds prior.

I’ve spent most of my career writing about fashion, so what I felt was familiar to me: a crushing need to buy something more expensive than it could ever be worth, plus the ambient self-hatred of knowing that marketing had worked on me, even though I had known what it was up to all along.

And more than a year later, somehow, my pink metal refuse receptacle feels like it was worth the money. I used one of those omnipresent Bed Bath & Beyond coupons and got 20 percent off, so my actual expenditure was closer to $100 — my deep well of millennial dread might make me spend money in dumb ways sometimes, but my also-very-millennial facility with online shopping means I won’t spend more than I have to.

My Simplehuman is as pristine today as the day I bought it, because its stainless exterior and soft curves make it easy to wipe down with Lysol until there is nary a fingerprint in sight. After you insert a bag, the can’s cap fully covers the overhang within, so the aesthetic of the thing is vaguely spaceship-y — cool, clean, uninterrupted metal.

And even the worst smells don’t escape, somehow. Once the lid (which descends in a slow, controlled, totally silent way, so as not to disturb its ideal, rich owners with something as pedestrian as sound) is closed, the stink stays in. If you can find it within yourself and your bank account to spend this much money on a place to put your empty takeout containers, the Simplehuman can does its best to let you forget that’s where you put them at all, which is the highest purpose a trash can could possibly achieve.

When you live with other people, whether it’s roommates or your family, the rarest pleasure is having things exactly how you’d prefer to have them. And in general, that’s fine, and even good — the small compromises of living with others make us better, less brittle, more human. But after decades of that, there’s undeniable pleasure in getting to be the final arbiter of all decisions, the chooser of all choices, the only person whose fault it could be if the trash can is grimy, and therefore the only one whose responsibility it is to maintain it. As the world grows more chaotic and our collective sense of ambient dread settles in to stay a while, I’ve found a commons of one’s own.

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In the beginning, there was the Dove Campaign for Real Beauty. It started innocuously enough, with a 2004 photography show in Toronto, then expanded to billboards, traditional print ads, and videos, all with similar messages: Women often feel bad about themselves and their appearance, and it’s bad that women feel that way.

The campaign first gained wide acclaim simply by showing a time-lapse version of a model in a faux beauty ad being photoshopped to unattainable perfection. The video contained no narration, but it demonstrated the manipulative nature of beauty advertising on both a level that ad giant Ogilvy & Mather intended and one it probably didn’t.

This was more than a decade ago, when the phrase “Facetuned Instagram” was total nonsense on a literal level instead of just a spiritual one, and an admission of photo editing still felt subversive to average consumers. The brands had been naughty, and Dove would gladly accept the praise for noting its own bad behavior.

The problem with using subversion as a corporate marketing tactic, though, is that if the brand is successful at it, the point it’s making becomes immediately non-subversive. And Dove was very successful at it — the beauty industry had always worked so hard to obscure its tactics and encode its negativity that many consumers felt understandably relieved to see the manipulation acknowledged, even if the only solution Dove offered was the opportunity to buy its products.  

As the viral campaign helped cultural knowledge of image editing spread rapidly, beyond just people who read the feminist websites that had long been critical of the practice, Dove had to up the ante. It did so by devising a series of ads that put unsuspecting women in various contrived situations — choosing to walk into a building through doors labeled “beautiful” or “average,” for example, or being spontaneously required to describe their faces to a sketch artist.

Those sketches were then compared to others’ descriptions of them, revealing for ad viewers just how much these women hate themselves. In the case of the door experiment, it’s unclear why anyone with a functional knowledge of how averages work could reasonably expect all women to consider their appearances “above average.”  

That these later ads leave out any larger agent responsible for the body image epidemic isn’t a mistake. Dove and its ad agency had picked up on something important in the positive response to its first ad: They didn’t need to take responsibility or propose a solution. While the logical continuation of that thought for anyone who doesn’t work at an ad agency would be that maybe brands should mind their business instead of dabbling in ineffective cultural criticism — that maybe they’re not the institutions we should be looking to on these topics at all — they saw an opportunity.

The cultural narrative about women’s bodies was so bad that simply identifying the problem would get Dove full credit and move plenty of product, but the urge to talk about a broad cultural problem while refusing to name a bad actor left the blame squarely on the shoulders of the women who had the temerity not to love themselves sufficiently.

In the context of advertising, women’s self-perceptions are invented out of whole cloth, with no apparent connection to the circumstances of their lives. And so we have the marketing landscape as we know it now, courtesy of Dove: gentle, millennial pink, and passive-aggressively reproachful of women who have allowed themselves to feel bad about their bodies. On top of all the old, existing insecurities, Dove posited that women might adopt a lucrative new one: shame over feeling bad in the first place. The brands had become self-aware, and an idea broadly known as body positivity hit the big-time.

The enormous public success of Dove’s ads flipped a switch in the minds of other people in the attention business. The Real Beauty campaign launched a thousand imitators, but not because it inspired a wave of genuine self-reflection in the people who make a living inventing things for women to feel bad about. Instead, it taught brands like Aerie and Target, which have both received waves of positive public attention for Photoshop-free campaigns, that they could get exposure for pennies on the advertising dollar if they created content that people felt compelled to share themselves, above and beyond paid placements.

For that, Ogilvy execs should probably be tried at the Hague for war crimes, but I’d settle for the broad acknowledgment that body positivity, as we know it in 2018, is a load of horse shit.

Like most ideas that become anodyne and useless enough for corporate marketing plans, “body positivity” didn’t begin that way — it started out radical and fringe, as a tenet of the fat acceptance movement of the 1960s. Back then, body positivity was just one element of an ideology that included public anti-discrimination protests and anti-capitalist advocacy against the diet industry, and it made a specific political point: To have a body that’s widely reviled and discriminated against and love it anyway, in the face of constant cultural messaging about your flaws, is subversive.

Now body positivity has shed its radical, practical goals in favor of an advocacy that’s entirely aesthetic and a problem that can be wholly solved by those looking to sell you something. The brands previously thought you should feel one way about yourself, and now they have decided that’s no longer appropriate for their goals. How you talk about yourself should change, even if nothing has changed that would materially affect how you feel.

The way these companies see it, our self-perception is unrelated to the external forces that determine the circumstances of our existence, which is why they think telling us to do better is enough to absolve them of responsibility. When brands offer solutions like using bigger models or those with more varied skin tones, or vowing that cellulite or stretch marks will survive their ads’ retouching process, they’re just barely eliding the fact that they think the problem is all in your head. Show you some different pictures and everything will get better, right?

Why a corporation’s opinions about anyone’s self-worth should matter or be seen as a legitimate sales tool for consumer goods is still unclear, but that dynamic has given rise to an entrepreneur class of its own. For instance, a conventionally attractive Instagram model clapping back at her haters, or a literal supermodel who feels the need to publicly answer her anonymous, powerless social media critics. Or that supermodel’s cousin who is a hero to women everywhere for displaying one single fat roll (again, on Instagram).

An alarming percentage of the public conversation about which bodies our culture values or rejects pivots around models, actresses, and other professionally beautiful people reassuring what they seem to believe is a dubious public that they are, in fact, super hot.

There’s nothing capitalism can’t alchemize into a business opportunity, but for it to be a useful tool for marketers, body positivity needed to be decoupled from fatness and political advocacy, sanitized, and neatly repackaged into something that begins and ends with images. So now, what we talk about when we talk about our physical selves is who gets to be thought of as pretty and who doesn’t, as though personal beauty is an obligatory part of a fulfilling life.

Brands have done such a good job at setting tight boundaries on our expectations and their own responsibilities that even when we chide fashion designers for not being size-inclusive on the runway, we gloss over the reason they’re not: The vast majority of fashion brands make no size-inclusive clothing and don’t see people with different bodies as worthy of being their customers.

Everlane recently launched a new underwear line featuring a plus-size model in its ad campaign, despite making no actual plus-size underwear for sale. A special outfit made for a size 14 runway model or a photo of the very largest woman who can wear a product made in a conventional size range doesn’t address structural bias in any meaningful way, but it does paper over the problem in the only way required by our current cultural values.

In this system, corporate interests have a clear opening to insert themselves into the fray and emerge as heroes simply by hiring an ad agency or casting director who can read the room, and without changing their business’s treatment of anyone. Body positivity in 2018 rushes right up to the line between aesthetics and politics but puts not one toe over it.

What brands and individuals alike are less enthusiastic to talk about is how having a noncompliant body — whether it’s fat, nonwhite, trans, disabled, or some combination thereof — impacts someone’s life, how those external conditions affect someone’s sense of self-worth, and how corporate interests have long benefited from and upheld the structural forces that create inequality.

There’s nothing an ad can (or intends to) do to ameliorate any of the actual problems that harm people’s self-perception, but that doesn’t stop brands from taking enormous credit for their newfound surface-level wokeness. There’s no radicalism in the sales department.

Instead, corporatized, media-friendly body positivity as we now know it puts the onus on people living in marginalized bodies to turn their criticism inward, which is essentially the same thing brands selling clothes or underwear or personal care products have required of us all along. This time, though, those people are told not to be ashamed of their physical selves, based on the premise that there was never anything wrong with them to begin with, as though the same companies that claim to be guiding this “movement” haven’t been selling insecurity for years.

What none of this addresses, of course, is why someone might hate their body. There is no inherent unhappiness to womanhood, or to fatness, or to blackness, or to anything else that American beauty standards have long treated as a problem. The conditions under which we loathe ourselves are socially constructed, but in practical terms, they’re very real.

Women aren’t taken seriously when they report sexual assault. Fat people are turned away from help for serious medical issues because of their weight. Black people are more likely to be the targets of state violence. Trans people are murdered at a rate far outpacing the population average. Having certain types of bodies makes you more likely to die an early and unnecessarily painful death that will be blamed on you before your body is even cold, so I’m not sure why it’s so mystifying and dismaying to the world at large that people in those bodies might not think much of themselves.

Contemporary body positivity makes it incumbent on people with nonconforming bodies to change their own self-perception without requiring anyone with any power to question what created the phenomenon in the first place.

Because consumer-facing brands are such effective attention magnets, and because so much media coverage of their marketing efforts is credulous and brand-friendly (advertising doesn’t exist without someplace to buy space, after all, and most media doesn’t exist without advertising — BuzzFeed notoriously deleted an op-ed critical of Dove’s marketing tactics after publication), these requirements for how we talk about our bodies and those of the people around us have seeped from the ads into the population at large.

Nothing has changed in how most people feel about themselves; instead, it’s simply become very gauche to articulate any of those negative feelings. That wouldn’t be very body-positive of you.

Criticizing the cultural regime of body positivity is a precarious pursuit, though. Media has been so flatly thin, white, straight, and cisgender for so long that seeing more types of bodies does feel like a step in the right direction, if only a very shallow and tentative first step. And body positivity as a vague concept has been a useful touchstone for plenty of people trying not to hate themselves in a world that insists on it.

Those people aren’t wrong to have found it useful; they’ve been put in a bad position and are using the tools available. What we need to do — and what will largely rely on preventing corporate interests from setting the parameters of the conversation and withholding praise from brands for doing the absolute bare minimum — is give them better tools. That’s why corporate-approved body politics feels so dangerous, though.

These companies, with all their resources and reach and ability to manipulate public opinion, have done something they do frequently: They’ve conflated identifying a problem with solving it, and if we let ourselves be convinced these issues are headed in the right direction and our problems really are internal, then we ignore the very real reasons so many people don’t feel good about being the people they are in the world we live in.

When you peel back all the layers of infantilization that Dove and its marketing progeny have heaped on us, though, you get something that’s pretty simple: A lot of people are genuinely sick of being pushed to feel bad about themselves all the time, and they probably also don’t want to expend the energy required to performatively love themselves in the body positivity mode preferred by the idea’s advocates online.

They probably just want to buy and use soap that works, have access to clothing in their size, and not think about their physical selves so much. They also probably don’t want to be denied job opportunities or refused lifesaving medical care because of what they look like. None of that requires a body wash brand to weigh in on anyone’s self-worth, and maybe the most helpful thing brands could do for all of us is shut the fuck up.

In theory, startup culture is supposed to valorize innovation and reward merit, but it’s increasingly difficult to ignore the shell game that so many consumer-oriented startups are playing. As we speak, Uber and Lyft are in competition to invent buses for the public transit-averse. Juicero recently ceased production of its signature juicer after Bloomberg reporters realized it squeezed juice out of the company’s proprietary bags about as well as the human hand. GrubHub makes money by obviating the need to make a phone call to the same three places you always order takeout from anyway. Silicon Valley is solving the inconveniences of affluence, one startup at a time.

Central in all of these business models, though, is the question of whose problems are worth solving, and maybe nowhere are those judgments clearer than in the world of fashion startups, with their dedication to reinventing the wheel for what is already the world’s most extravagantly well-served apparel consumer base: thin women.

The statistics about American women who wear plus-sizes are so oft-cited that they feel like cliches. According to a 2016 study in the International Journal of Fashion Design, Technology and Education, the average American woman is now between a size 16 and 18. According to Bloomberg, the plus-size retail apparel market represents a $20 billion opportunity, with growth outpacing the overall market 17 percent to 7 percent in 2016 and a consumer base starved for quality clothing. For fat women in the US, it’s fast fashion or almost nothing.

In a sales climate where traditional retailers feel creeping dread over shoppers shifting their discretionary spending toward “experiences” like food and travel, it appears to have occurred to almost no one to make clothes for fat people, who are begging for more options, often in public and on social media. Brands want to do business on a mass scale, but they don’t want to dress mass bodies. Fashion startups are well-equipped to take on this challenge—they’re generally building supply chains and product lineups from scratch, often with an emphasis on rethinking and improving fit, which gives them the opportunity to serve whichever consumer bases they choose from the get-go—but just like the traditional retailers they claim to improve upon, most of them have declined.

Everlane, the most prominent apparel startup, makes basics like T-shirts and jeans at a relatively affordable price point. The hook is what it calls “radical transparency”: Everlane will tell you how much all the elements of its products cost and how much it’s marking up the final product. The clothing itself is simple and sharp, with shrewd seasonal acknowledgements to trends among affluent millennials, like wide-legged cropped pants and retro loafers. It’s the kind of stuff you want to have in your closet when you sleep through your alarm and rush into work for an important meeting. If you’re above a size 14, though, you’d better make sure that alarm is set, because the company does not make any clothes for you.

In 2015, I wondered aloud on Twitter whether Everlane had ever commented on its limited sizing (at the time, 12 was the largest size available), and the brand’s official account responded that it would love to venture into plus once it had the capacity to do so. That same year, Everlane pulled in $51 million in revenue, and its 2016 projections were north of $100 million. Since then, Everlane launched a kids collection (“kids deserve quality too,” according to its website), as well as new products like denim and footwear. The company also recently opened its first store, in the expensive Soho neighborhood of Manhattan. There are still no plus-sizes, but the company has added a 14 and an XL, meaning it now makes a fuller spectrum of straight sizes, though not as full as traditional “elevated basics” brands like Gap or J.Crew, which go to a 20 and a 16, respectively.

Everlane did not make anyone available for an interview, but the company did send us the following statement: “The Everlane story is one that has been built slowly and carefully. Our customer understands that Everlane is a democratic and honest brand and we want to be inclusive of all people. Given that, it is on our roadmap to do plus-size, but we need to take the time to do it right. To do plus, it requires more than extended sizing. We need to launch plus as a separate brand with new fits, new models and new fabrics to ensure that the styles fit and look great. As we gain scale and get new customers, we will be able to focus our energy on launching this line.” The statement echoes a sentiment that I heard from every straight-size CEO I spoke with, even those who have begun to make their brands more inclusive: that plus-size people need to be patient while others solve the egregious problems of their bodies. Women over a certain size are always a burden, never a priority. They’re expected to wait while others are served first.

Reformation, a young, California-based company that makes cool-girl party dresses and separates, is another brand that embraces forward-thinking values in some areas while still leaving out the majority of US women based on their size. The company puts an enormous emphasis on sustainability and sound manufacturing practices for its clothing; its sizing maxes out at a 12. If you’re slender and also short, though, you’re in luck — Reformation launched a petites range in 2015. And while expanded sizing across the board and in all directions is certainly welcome in fashion, a company’s willingness to go ever smaller while so far avoiding the business of average-size American women feels like it confirms all the worst suspicions plus-size customers have about when the industry might give them better options, and why it’s chosen not to.

In a statement to us, though, Reformation promised that its near future would be more inclusive: “Size diversity is incredibly important to us at Reformation and we are working hard to address this in 2018. We’ve already made efforts in this area, featuring models with different body types and launching collections for larger chested women and petites. But we fully recognize that there is still much more we need to do. We always want everyone to look and feel their best in our clothes and have been methodical in our approach to make sure we’re doing it right. We’re excited to introduce an expanded size range in 2018.” Not only is the brand’s upcoming expansion good news, but it’s sadly refreshing not to see it blame the delay on some imaginary feat of technological innovation required to make a casual dress in a larger size.

Galling in a different way are startups that brand themselves around the importance of serving people of all sizes while only serving those who can walk into any store in the local mall and walk out with a bra. Bra manufacturer and retailer True & Co first came on my radar with Facebook ads promising “bras for every woman.” Although the company’s social media copy has shifted (perhaps in response to the horde of commenters under every ad who asked why “every woman” didn’t include their size), its website still prominently features the following description of True & Co.’s aims: “We are a new kind of intimate apparel brand based on one simple ideal: for all of us, every woman, to feel comfortable in our own skin.” The brand’s cupped bras max out at a size 38DD, a band and cup combination easy to find at Victoria’s Secret or any department store lingerie section.

Via email, True & Co. co-founder and CEO Michelle Lam says this is indeed a question they hear frequently from consumers, and that the company is working on it. “Bigger breasts need different design details to ensure that they will support you without discomfort,” she says. “So when we design our bras, we don’t take shortcuts for the sake of a bottom line, and you can’t rush that.” What she doesn’t address is the fact that plus-size people don’t all have enormous breasts — larger band sizes are extremely difficult to find in A through D cups as well, so why not make those available now, instead of making everyone with a larger band size wait until the company perfects the H cup?

“It is a long and very detail-oriented process that we are currently in the middle of,” Lam continues. “We do not simply scale up our bras. A team is working on the next phase of size expansion to get us a little closer to our desires. We do make product for every woman — we just might still be making it.” Other than True & Co. wanting credit for Schrodinger’s Bra, which both does and does not exist, implied in this (very common) logic is a sense of which people are considered priorities, and which are not. The technology exists to make bras for larger people, and it can be done alongside making them for smaller people. It can be done before a brand launches. Companies are always asking women over a certain size to wait just a little longer, apologize just a little more about the scale of difficulty their very common bodies represent, and be just a little more grateful that anyone is getting around to them at all.

If you read the “about” pages on apparel startups’ websites, it’s clear most of them take care to envision their ideal consumers and what they value. The end result often paints a picture of a curious, engaged shopper who cares about manufacturing practices, material sourcing, and the social or political statement made by spending money with a particular company. A shopper who thinks about fit and is interested in how technology might solve the problems in their closet. None of the brands say it so bluntly, but the shopper they want is intelligent. In that context, it’s all the more jarring that so few entrepreneurs could conceive of a fat person who is also smart.

Slowly, though, it seems like founders are acknowledging the opportunity. AYR, which makes trendy-minimal basics from luxurious materials, recently launched its first plus-size option, a skinny jean that goes up to a size 22, which will soon be extended to a 24. Maggie Winter, AYR’s co-founder and CEO, told me that once demand was clear, it felt in line with AYR’s independent ethos to go in a direction few others had tried. “Just because it’s always been done a certain way doesn’t mean the future can’t be different,” she says. “But if you want something to change, you have to show up and make it happen.” So far, she says, the response from shoppers has been great: “In the first 30 days, we sold through 50 percent of our order. We’re running out of sizes, and are working on cutting more.” AYR has plans to expand its size range throughout the brand, starting with the popular Robe coat. It’s the kind of piece that’s basically impossible to find for plus-size shoppers now.

Similarly, bra startup ThirdLove launched with products that covered the size range served by most brands, with a slight twist: The brand also included half-cup sizes. ThirdLove’s sizing options have slowly expanded, though, and CEO and co-founder Heidi Zak told me that after a beta test of sizing up to a 46H, the brand will now have one of its most popular bras available up to that size by the second quarter of 2018. “It’s been a big focus from day one to offer as many sizes as we can, and to not make product that’s different for extended sizes,” she says. “That was a big learning point for us when we were extending our size range.”

Even better, though, are the few startups that have treated plus-size customers like priorities all along. The most established of this small stable of companies is Universal Standard, which makes apparel in sizes 10 to 28. The look is precise and high-end, and the pieces are often sexy in a sophisticated way that’s usually reserved for women without wide hips or large chests. Co-founder and creative director Alex Waldman told me that starting with such an underserved market was obvious. “I think this is the first time this consumer has had the kind of clothing that she sees her straight-size friends buying,” she says. “We really don’t see other plus-size brands as our peers. We look at Rag & Bone and Theory and Helmut Lang. If you put something on from those brands, you just look cool, and we thought, why can’t a woman with a double-digit size look cool? There’s this imaginary line that says you can look cool up to this size, and after that, you’re just not allowed.” Waldman was also the only founder I spoke with who acknowledged the need to serve larger plus-sizes; even if the industry is making incremental gains for some plus-size women, those over a 24 are still roundly ignored.

Also promising is denim newcomer Warp + Weft, which makes its full line of jeans in sizes 00 to 24. Founder Sarah Ahmed acknowledged that in the development process, people occasionally raised the concern that serving plus-size customers would harm the brand’s image, but she brushed it off. “I simply said, ‘Look around you,’” she says. “‘Look at your friends, your family, your coworkers, and you’ll find that we all are actually part of any incredible mosaic of where we come from and what we look like.’” Ahmed also said that developing product for plus customers hasn’t been as alien an experience as designers often make it out to be. “The plus shopper is like any other girl when it comes to what she wants in her denim — for it to hold its shape, be comfortable 24/7, and make the butt look good.”

Even with this handful of bright spots, it beggars belief that apparel startups are so profoundly averse to fat people that the vast majority of them won’t deign to take their money. The problem is larger than the assumptions made by entrepreneurs, though. Everlane founder Michael Preysman is revered as a “radical” who could potentially fix all of fashion retail, but I could not find evidence that a single reporter had ever asked him why his company has avoided an apparel market that is begging for exactly what Everlane already makes. Press that covers Silicon Valley and the fashion industry are notoriously credulous and PR-friendly, and there’s little incentive for them to go to bat for a class of people that they, too, often don’t consider worth the fuss. That so many brands fumbled for answers to even the most basic questions about their sizing practices seems indicative of how infrequently they’ve been asked those questions in the past.

All of these companies are allowed to court whatever clientele they choose, but fatness doesn’t exist in a vacuum, and the choice to exclude people based on their bodies is not value-neutral. Black and Latina women are much more likely to be overweight than white women, and the fashion industry has longstanding and well-documented problems with race. Also, many of the worst, most dehumanizing stereotypes about fat people — that they’re lazy, stupid, and slovenly — are deeply ingrained in fashion’s culture and attitudes, so much so that entrepreneurs can be dissuaded from making plus-sizes by the fear that both customers and others in the industry will see them as down-market.

We’ve been taught so effectively to loathe fat people, and especially women who refuse to make themselves small and convenient, that not even the endless drive for profit can convince some of the world’s most enthusiastic capitalists to consider them a priority. At this point, most of them seem content to let $20 billion in low-hanging fruit wither on the vine.