What the Fashion Industry Got Wrong About Women Over Fifty

At some point in the late twentieth century, the fashion industry made a decision. It wasn't announced or debated or subjected to any scrutiny. It simply happened, gradually and then completely, until it was so thoroughly embedded in the industry's assumptions that it stopped feeling like a decision at all and started feeling like a natural law.

The decision was this: women over fifty weren't relevant.

Not just in the obvious ways — the advertising that ignores them, the campaigns that airbrush them out, the runways on which they don't exist. But in the invisible, structural ways that affect every woman who picks up a garment and tries it on. The pattern cutting that assumes a body unchanged by time. The sizing that stops at 16 as though no woman of consequence exists beyond it. The proportions drawn for a figure that most women never had and virtually none retain past forty. The strict silhouettes that bear no relation to the way most women's bodies actually are and move and live.

These are not accidents. They are the result of an industry that forgot to think about a very large number of its customers.

The consequences are felt every day, in changing rooms across the country, by women who are accomplished, confident, financially independent and entirely unable to find clothes that are designed for them. Women who have spent decades developing their own taste and are now being told, implicitly and repeatedly, that the industry has nothing for them. Women who deserve better — and who know it.

At EdNerat, we started from a different assumption. Our patterns are cut for bodies that have lived and want to move. Our sizing runs from 6 to 20 and we offer fully bespoke sizing as a matter of course.

All of our models are over fifty. This is not a marketing decision. We do it because we can and should and because it matters – they matter.

We also cut many of our patterns twice. Once for a smaller cup size, once for a fuller one. This makes an enormous difference to the way a coat sits and feels. It means that those with smaller chests aren't left with extra fabric sagging forlornly, and that those with fuller chests don't have to jump a size or two just to accommodate them. For women whose bodies have changed over the years, this kind of considered pattern cutting is not a luxury. It is what good making looks like.

The fashion industry's indifference to women over fifty is not just a commercial failure — though it is that, spectacularly, given that this demographic controls a significant proportion of consumer spending. It is a failure of imagination. A failure to see. A failure to ask the most basic question a maker can ask: who is this for, and what do they actually need?

These are the women we think about when we design and make. Not the only women — but the women the rest of the industry forgot. And we think that is worth saying plainly. Explore our collection here.