Big Business

Size 52 hot pants? It sounds improbable, but a cheerful 300-pounder named Nancy Austin not only wears them but markets them. She is drawing customers from all over the U.S. for custom-designed fat-lady clothes. Until she began selling her bright, fashionable originals at a small shop in Las Vegas, clothes for chubby women were mostly dismal, shapeless outfits intended primarily for camouflage. Nancy has other ideas. Her shop, which opened in May 1970 on a skinny $5,000 investment, is now grossing nearly $100,000 a year.

Sales figures like that are produced, in part at least, by avoiding the use of words like fat. Nancy calls her customers "queen-size ladies" and is equally tactful about sizes. "Most stores call you small, medium, large or extra large." she says, "but in our shop you're Petite (size 16 to 20), Coquette (size 221 to 261) or Mademoiselle (261 to 321)." Anything larger ranks in the Duchess class. Nancy herself is in the Mademoiselle bracket, and she has ordained that all her models and sales personnel must be at least a size 16. "We never show our clothes on skinny models," she says. "If the models are a size 10 or 12, how am I to know how it will look on me?"'

Some of Nancy's styles do not undergo annual changes. "When I find a good basic idea," she says, "we stick with it, just changing the sleeves, collars and accents." One popular outfit is her polyester knit Nancy Pants, and an other style is the Tom Jones blouse, which has a full sleeve with a wide, snug cuff. She makes gold lame pantsuits, gaucho pants, knickers and patio dresses, and refuses to rule out any particular style for her customers--except for "anything tight" and numbers with buttons all the way down the front (they may gap and pull open). Nancy Austin believes that her clothes make fat women feel happier. Perhaps so, but the effect is usually grotesque, suggesting that, on the whole, dieting would be a better solution.

Nancy's dress-designing career began at the age of twelve, when she whipped together a bright fuchsia number that did wonders for her superpudgy figure. The daughter of F. Byrne Austin, who was executive director of the War Claims Commission under Harry Truman, she put together her own gown for the Truman inaugural ball, caught the eye of Washington hostesses and began to design clothes for them.

She also went into show business and made something of a hit as a comedienne in Las Vegas, but henceforth fashion may come first. Last April, in fact, she was named Nevada's Small Businessman of the Year.

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