Toronto designer’s first boutique aims to bring greater size inclusivity to women’s fashion

Toronto designer Miriam Baker has been busy since the opening of her first physical store location in Bayview Village last week. The boutique features Baker’s signature line of classic formal and casual wear tailored to women with fuller busts. The collection is an indication of a growing need for body diversity and a greater range of sizes in women’s fashion in particular.

Baker came up with the idea for her clothing collection while studying at Ryerson University. Upon graduation, she won a competition while with the Toronto Fashion Incubator and used the money to begin her line. Though she has only operated online and through wholesale retail since 2015, the boutique has already found immediate success due to the mall’s heavy foot traffic and high-calibre shoppers.

@miriambakerdesigns

The boutique opens into a bright space with modern white shelving and fitting rooms in the back. Behind the boutique, Baker has a cutting table set up so she can work and cut fabric while still helping customers.

The store offers a sampling of Baker’s best-selling styles. “It’s a good selection of what’s available online that you can finally see in person.”

Baker’s dresses and designs are tailored to fit women with larger busts. She was inspired to focus on this after struggling to find form-fitting and flattering apparel for herself. “I was basically solving my own problem. I could never find clothes that fit, and once I found out why, I thought this is something I can fix in the industry.”

The reason busty women can’t find clothes that fit, Baker says, is because all womenswear is designed to fit women who are a B cup, even though the average woman fits closer to a D.

“It just doesn’t make any sense and I thought, you know, I can actually help women like me and make clothes that actually accommodate at least a D cup.”

The designer recognizes that some busty women are very thin in the waist and the extra fabric needed in the chest isn’t needed everywhere else in the dress. So, what she has done is taken a size four and made it to fit a D cup. She then grades up from there.

The demand for brands and designers to provide clothing that is more inclusive to women of different shapes and sizes has been becoming more popular across social media. Self-love campaigns and conversations about body positivity actively call out brands and companies to become more inclusive in their size offerings.

One such self-love influencer is twenty-two-year-old model Mariah Alderson (@thecurvymariah), who understands the struggle of finding clothing that fits well and looks good. As a plus-size woman, she has noticed the lack of inclusivity in the fashion industry since she was in high school.

“It was really hard to find places to shop,” she says. “Not only with stuff that fit me, but stuff that appealed to my demographic. It would be a lot of clothes that maybe an older person would wear but not crop tops and skinny jeans.”


Alderson describes frustrating shopping trips to the mall where she went into twelve stores for her thinner friends to shop in, while there were only two stores that catered to her body type. And worse, these stores would be more expensive because there was little competition and oftentimes larger sizes would even be classified as “specialty products.”

And the stores that did have plus size sections had them in the back corner, as if they were being shamefully hidden from the public. “It was pretty isolating,” Alderson recalls.

Alderson and Baker agree that a lot of brands that advertise as being inclusive to plus size women is just performative marketing.

“Even big brands [that market as offering ‘plus size’] run small from what they say they are,” says Alderson. “I think it’s almost to hit the mid-size to lower-plus size demographic and hopefully hush the rest of us.”

Baker suggests that maybe the fashion industry should stop trying to sell “inclusivity” and brands should instead just focus on one thing that they can really excel at.

Investing in plus-size clothing would also be a worthy investment for retailers; the global plus-size industry continues to grow, with a report from Allied Market Research projecting growth from $480 billion in 2019 to $690 billion in 2027.

“I think if everyone had their own little niche, we could fit so many women so much better, rather than trying to fit all women in this one-size-fits-all that pretends to do everything. I think it’s great to just be good at one thing and to be known for just one thing and have this small set of women who knows that they can rely on you for this one specific fit.”

That’s why for Baker, her focus is drawing attention to a woman’s favourite part of herself. “I don’t do much embellishing because I think women are breathtaking. I think a woman should be in like a beautifully cut dress and that dress should just let her shine and you see the woman.”