How Plus-Size Denim Finally Got the Fit Right

For decades, a pair of jeans in a larger size was often just a straight-size pattern scaled up — wider through the waist and hip in the same fixed proportion, with none of the extra shaping a fuller hip-to-waist ratio actually needs. The result was the waist gap: a jean that fit the hip and pulled away at the small of the back, long blamed on the body wearing it rather than the pattern block that never accounted for it. Over the past decade, four of the denim market's most visible players — Universal Standard, Old Navy, Good American, and Levi's — have each, on their own timeline, rebuilt that pattern block from the body up instead of the straight-size sample down.

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Universal Standard launched in 2015, founded by Alexandra Waldman and Polina Veksler, and now produces apparel across a 00-to-40 range. When the label launched its own denim line, called Denim by US at the time (the collection is now folded into the brand's main denim assortment without that separate name), in 2019, it arrived to a waitlist of 1,700 customers who signed up before a single pair shipped, priced from $90 and cut across the full size range from day one rather than added later as an afterthought. Waldman, interviewed by Forbes around the launch, was blunt about why a plus-size pattern can't just be a scaled-up straight-size one: "People always think fashion is fashion, that you can compare straight-size fashion to plus-size fashion," she said. "But you cannot. It's like comparing oranges and giraffes." Waldman died of cancer in September 2023, at 57; Veksler continues to run the company as chief executive.

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Old Navy took a different route in 2021 with Bodequality, folding its separate plus line into the main collection at the same price across sizes XS to 4X — ending the practice of charging more for a larger size. The rollout didn't hold everywhere: in May 2022, parent company Gap Inc. pulled Bodequality's expanded sizing from 75 U.S. stores and 15 Canadian stores, with then-CEO Sonia Syngal saying the initiative had been "launched too broadly and too quickly" for the demand it actually saw, leaving the company with excess inventory in sizes that weren't moving. Bodequality has continued online and in most stores since — a July 2026 company reference still describes sizes 00 to 30 as integrated across store floors rather than segregated into a separate plus section — though Old Navy hasn't published an updated store-by-store figure since the 2022 pullback. The brand also runs a "Choose Your Model" tool online that shows the same jean on bodies across a range of sizes before checkout.

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Good American, founded by Emma Grede and Khloé Kardashian, builds its denim range — sizes 00 to 32 — around fit rather than one core silhouette stretched wide. In September 2018, the brand rolled out an entirely new size, 15, after its own measurements showed a bigger jump in body proportions between sizes 14 and 16 than between any other two sizes in its range — a gap the company said was producing 50 percent more returns on those two sizes than on any other. Levi's took a more data-driven route to a similar problem with Curve ID, a fit system built from a study of more than 60,000 women's body scans and organized around the measured difference between hip and seat rather than a single size-up, size-down scale; the brand added its two largest Curve ID sizes, 36 and 38, in fall 2011, and the current 501 Curve style still adds room through the seat and thigh with a tailored hip-to-waist ratio aimed at closing the same waistband gap Waldman described. None of the four is finished — plus-size denim still tops out well short of the fashion industry's broader range, and every one of these fixes arrived after customers absorbed years of bad fit first. But the direction across all four is the same one this outlet traced in outdoor gear in "Room on the Trail": a pattern block built for the hip that's actually there, not stretched from one that wasn't.