Faith Logan Spent Nineteen Years Dressing Other Women’s Bodies Before She Dressed Her Own
Nineteen Years on the Other Side of the Rack
I spent nineteen years choosing clothes for women I’d never met. Fluorescent-lit buying offices, sell-through reports, size curves scrawled on a whiteboard.
That was my job for two decades: buying for a regional department store chain, deciding which size 14 through 24 dresses got a second order and which ones got marked down by July.
I was good at it. What I couldn’t do, for most of those years, was walk into my own closet and feel good about a single thing hanging in it.
I’m Faith Logan. I’m fifty-two, and I’ve been the founder and senior editor of Style Niva since 2016.
I have an associate degree in fashion merchandising from a community college that doesn’t even go by that name anymore, and nineteen years of on-the-job experience that taught me far more than the degree did.
I built this site because the industry I worked inside of for two decades still hadn’t figured out how to dress the body I actually have.
I left the corporate job that year, not out of anger, but out of a question I kept getting from the sixty or so people who read a small fashion newsletter I wrote on the side after work.
Where do you actually find things that fit? Style Niva grew out of answering that, one outfit at a time, typed at my kitchen table in Dayton after my kids had gone to bed.
Why I Stayed Here
Plus size fashion isn’t a category I picked off a list. It’s the reason I have a career at all.
The clearest memory I have is from 2004, my first buying trip alone. I stood in front of a rack of sample dresses that stopped at a size 14, in a store where a third of our repeat customers wore an 18 or higher.
Nobody in that meeting said a word about it. I didn’t either, and I’ve thought about that more than I’d like to admit.
I’ve since sat in meetings where a brand capped a dress line at a 1X because the extra fabric yardage ate into the margin. I’ve watched extended sizing get pulled from a budget the moment sales dipped, while straight sizes stayed untouched.
I understand exactly why the industry works the way it does. That’s part of why I stopped taking its word for anything.
Who I’m Writing To
This site is for women roughly between forty and sixty-five, mostly a size 14 to 28, who are done guessing. Not women chasing a trend built for a straight-size mannequin, hoping it translates.
Women who want to know if a dress runs small through the shoulders before they order it, whether a wrap style actually stays closed when you sit down, and whether the return window is long enough to bother trying.
If you’ve bought the same style of dress in three different brands because none of them fit the same way twice, you already know exactly why this site exists.
How I Actually Do This
Nothing gets written about here until it’s been on an actual body. Usually mine. Sometimes one of the three women who write alongside me.
- I order the item myself, at full price, in my usual size and one size up.
- I wear it for a full day before I write a word about it, not five minutes in front of a mirror under good lighting.
- I lay it flat and measure it against the brand’s own size chart, because the two rarely match.
- I check the fabric weight and the return policy before I check how it photographs.
That last one matters more than people think. A dress can look right in a product photo and still be a nightmare to send back. I learned that lesson the expensive way more than once.
A Few Things You’d Learn About Me at Dinner
- I keep a spreadsheet of every pair of jeans I’ve tried since 2016. Four hundred and some rows: brand, size, rise, whether I kept it.
- I still hem pants on a thirty-year-old Singer that belonged to my mother, even though I could pay someone to do it in ten minutes.
- My reading glasses have lived on a chain around my neck since I turned fifty. I resisted that chain for longer than I probably should have.
- I have two grown sons and one granddaughter who already has stronger opinions about pockets than most adults I know.
What I Owe You as a Reader
Every piece that goes up on this site gets fact-checked before it’s published, whether it’s a sizing note or a claim about a fabric blend. I personally read everything that runs here, or one of my senior editors does, before it goes live.
Nothing gets published without at least one round of editing for accuracy and clarity. When a brand changes its sizing or discontinues something we recommended, we go back and update that post instead of letting it sit there wrong.
And when a link earns us a commission, or a brand has sent us a product to try, you’ll see that noted plainly on the page, not buried in fine print at the bottom.
Before You Go
If you landed on this page standing in your closet, holding something that doesn’t sit right, wondering whether the problem is you or the dress: it’s the dress. Almost always, it’s the dress.
Come back when you need to know if something is worth ordering. Chances are, I’ve already tried it on.
Faith Logan
