Wheres the Petite Department?
Twenty-five years ago, America’s department stores long obsessed with that Seventh Avenue archetype, the tall, thin, leggy lady discovered her shorter sibling, the petite woman. They gave her a special clothing size, her own department and, over time, access to top designers like Ralph Lauren, Donna Karan and Calvin Klein. Small was suddenly sexy. Or at least sexier. But the love affair with little women appears to be over. Three of the country’s most influential fashion emporiums Neiman Marcus, Saks Fifth Avenue and Bloomingdale’s have quietly eliminated or drastically scaled back their petite departments in the past several months, infuriating many longtime customers. Given that manufacturers produce clothing in only a handful of standard sizes among them, juniors, misses and plus size the abandonment of petite sizes at the highest levels of American retailing represents a sea change in fashion, forcing some designers to either stop making special sizes for smaller women or re-evalua
