More of You to Love, Thank God

I have never understood the appeal of someone assembled in a lab for maximum symmetry. Some chiseled, oiled thing doing slow crunches for an audience—that does nothing for me. What I actually want is the guy at the bar who’s committed to his double cheeseburger, who’s got a beard and absolutely no interest in your opinion about his caloric intake, who takes up space in a way that feels deliberate and unapologetic. That’s the one.

Which makes it personally satisfying that ASOS decided to extend their menswear into XXXXL territory. More than twenty labels are involved—including Burton, Noose and Monkey, and Wrangler alongside ASOS’s own lines—and the pitch is straightforward: more options, bigger size range, the same premise that you should be able to dress well at whatever size you happen to be. Not a radical concept, but one that took longer than it should have to arrive.

The idea that bigger guys are somehow a niche demographic the fashion industry can afford to ignore has always been a curious fiction, given how many of them there are and how much money they presumably have to spend on clothes. The soft, round, broad man who eats what he likes and dresses well in spite of and because of his body—he deserves options. He deserves not to hunt through the back of a rack. He deserves, frankly, more than he’s historically been given. And now he can go to ASOS and buy something that fits. Small mercies.