These women entrepreneurs are redefining fashion with size-inclusive clothing lines
HerStory brings to you stories of women entrepreneurs who are breaking the mould by making the fashion industry more sustainable and size-inclusive.
Going to a mall and choosing a dress only to find out it doesn’t have your size is heartbreaking but hardly uncommon.
Society has long been dictating beauty standards, and the Indian apparel industry has always followed suit. For a person with a bigger build, finding the best fit in their size is a challenge often overlooked.
However, it is not all doom and gloom. With time, the apparel industry is pacing towards a bigger change. To improve the shopping experience for plus-size women, a new wave of women entrepreneurs has come forward to make fashion size-inclusive, as one size cannot fit all.
HerStory has compiled a list of women entrepreneurs trying to revolutionise the industry by offering clothing options for all body shapes and sizes.
Jeevika Tyagi and Kanupriya Mundhra, aastey
During the COVID-19 pandemic, staying in the comfort of our homes and the increased focus on a healthy lifestyle made athleisure wear the new vogue. While many brands launched activewear collections, a few only catered to the plus-size populace.
On realising the gap, Jeevika Tyagi and Kanupriya Mundhra decided to call the shots. In 2021, the duo launched (a Sanskrit word meaning to be fully present in every moment), a Mumbai-based D2C (direct-to-consumer) startup. The brand claims to be the first D2C to crack the manufacturing of recycled polyester apparel.
“Surrounded by brands that had limited availability in sizing and were continuously producing clothes that were harmful to the environment, we wanted to create something polar opposite, that offers a counter-culture to fast fashion culture. Keeping these things in mind, we decided to build a brand on the foundation of two core values: sustainability and size inclusivity,” Jeevika tells HerStory.
From creating India’s first sustainable and size-inclusive leggings to offering a wide range of options like sports bras, yoga mats, eye masks, and tote bags, the brand is making it big in the activewear segment.
Udita Bansal, True Brown Lifestyle
Gurugram-based company Lifestyle garnered popularity in the urban ethnic wear segment since its conception in 2016. Founded by Udita Bansal, an alumnus of the NIFT, the company roots in size inclusivity. The brand offers a wide variety of sizes from 2XS to 6XL and goes up to 10XL on special orders.
“The brand has embraced size inclusivity since the beginning and does not charge anything extra while offering plus sizes,” Udita says.
With their clothes starting from Rs 1,000 onwards, the brand offers an option, wherein buyers can customise clothes in its catalogue as per their preferences, like colour, length of the sleeves, and other size specifications.
Besides clothes, the brand offers diverse collections of jewellery (earrings, necklaces, and rings) and home collections (lamps, planters, vases, and tableware).
Gayatri Singh, Vixxen
Many plus-size models and body positivity campaigners are rooting for size inclusivity, and women have refused to be dictated by society about what they should wear.
As such, after designing her own clothes for almost 15 years, Gayatri Singh, a 42-year-old entrepreneur, founded her plus-size brand Vixxen for curvy women. “Having been a curvy girl all my life, it was most challenging to find stylish clothes for my body type,” she says.
Singh noticed that the market lacked plus-sized designer clothes, and there it was—‘her eureka moment’. Her challenges with finding plus-size designer clothes, coupled with her years of experience designing clothes, led her to start a fun, bold, and premium clothing line catering to curvy women in India.
“All through my growing years, I have encountered this at every juncture of my life. Whether it was my peers in school, college, family members and, above all, at my workplace. Our society and their mental setup are not very kind to differently-sized people,” she adds.
Akanksha Savanal, A Curve Story
“Everyone deserves to experience fashion, no matter their size,” believes Akanksha Savanal, Founder of .
Starting her career at 18 years of age as a stylist, Akanksha assisted a Bollywood stylist for two years, after which she co-founded a styling company. It was then she realised the vacuum of fashion options for curvy women, and she decided to do something about it.
In April 2019, Savanal founded A Curve Story to offer inclusive clothing to “break societal biases and motivate people to be comfortable in their skin.”
The brand offers in-house designed, gender-neutral apparel, such as shirts, tops, skirts, suits, co-ord sets, and dresses in varied sizes, ranging from UK 8 to UK 30 and beyond.
The brand has a clientele of nearly 1,000, most of whom are women between the ages of 23 and 45 from across India.
Divya Goenka, The Pink Moon
Divya Goenka is the Founder of , a brand that offers high-quality western wear for plus-size women, such as jeans, jackets, tops, workout wear, and dresses.
Goenka was inspired to venture into the apparel market when she returned from the US in 2016 after discovering that the Indian market lacked plus-size western wear options. “Most brands with plus size options did not meet my style and aesthetics or were very expensive,” she tells HerStory.
Based in Bengaluru, the brand provides a wide range of sizes from Large to 6XL, which are “mature and classic, in high-quality fabrics, and reasonable price points”.
The startup focuses on making products as per the body shape of women in India—different from that of the West, to make their products stand out. The brand also claims to be eco-friendly as they use discarded fabrics.
With a customer base of 7,000, most of whom are working women between the ages of 30 and 40 from Tier I and II cities, the products are available on its website and platforms like Myntra, Amazon, Limeroad, and AJIO.
Edited by Suman Singh