How The Sims 4 designed for size-inclusive fashion

polygon.com:

I spent a good chunk of my childhood developing a passion for fashion. It started with dressing up Disco Barbie in shiny purple pants before I went digital with dress-up games on Flash sites. Once I found my all-time favorite fashion game, Style Savvy on the DS, I spent hours crafting looks as a virtual boutique owner, managing my inventory, and competing in fashion shows to prove I was the ultimate stylist. I credit Style Savvy games for sparking my love for both fashion and management simulations. But even though I loved them, they definitely weren’t perfect. As I grew up, I looked at the girls on my screens and started to wonder: Why is everybody so skinny?

Video Game Fashion Week is Polygon’s attempt at covering the fun, silly, and highly important world of character style.

A lack of body diversity obviously isn’t just a thing in video games. Growing up on a steady diet of Project Runway and America’s Next Top Model made it clear to me that there was a body standard in fashion, one that most of us did not fit into. I knew the standard existed but didn’t realize until later that it plagued even my favorite games. Consider the Style Savvyseries and Love Nikki. They both only had one kind of model, skinny and conventionally feminine. Both the Style Savvy series and Love Nikki introduced the ability to dress conventionally masculine models over time, but those are also restricted to thin body types.

Maybe it comes down to logistics. If you introduced a new body type into a Style Savvy game, for example, then you would have to remodel each piece of clothing so it fits onto that new body type, so they default to using skinny models. This reminds me of a somewhat similar argument used to advocate against size inclusivity in