Isaac Mizrahi's Right About Plus-Size Fashion

Isaac Mizrahi is awesome. He designs a great collection for Target, he's a judge on Project Runway: All Stars, and he's dressed a slew of famous women. Now, we have a new reason to love him. The designer spoke to HuffPost Live about the "right way" to incorporate plus-size clothing into major fashion lines, and he is spot-on.

During the HuffPost Live Segment, a reader asked Mizrahi about the lack of plus-size designs featured on Project Runway. Referring to his personal experience of being overweight as a child, he expressed his distaste for the way plus-size clothing and the women who buy it are segregated from the rest of fashion:

I don't want to speak to a plus-sized woman differently than I speak to a woman... I think, having been plus-size in my life, you know, I don't like being spoken down to and ushered off to the "husky" section. When I was a little boy, I hated that.

Beyond that, Mizrahi said he believes that all designers and retailers are responsible for creating clothing for all body types. "If you're going to do clothes, you need to do them in a whole size range." He is so right about this! Why do designers act like almost no women are above a size 12 when that simply is not the case?

Mizrahi also thinks that the clothing companies that do cater to so-called plus-size women should stop separating out plus-size from straight-size designs. "I don't like segregation, I like incorporation, I like integration." The designer, whose clothing does cater to a wide range of sizes, gave QVC — the distributor of his brand — credit for featuring his designs from XXS to 3XL and called out brands like ASOS and Forever 21 for keeping their plus size brands separate from their other wares.

The integration Mizrahi calls for won't happen overnight, but hopefully his much-needed comments will help spur change. Wouldn't it be amazing if fashion wasn't mostly inaccessible for any woman over size 14? Wouldn't it make sense for more designers to design for all sizes and let women decide what works and what doesn't? Wouldn't it be remarkable if most of fashion operated like Mizrahi's QVC line, such that, as he describes it, "Everybody can wear what they think they look good in, and when they feel comfortable, that's when it's right"?