Pioneer of upscale plus-size fashion
Nancye Radmin, a pioneer of plus-size fashion who for two decades ran an upscale chain of stores, the Forgotten Woman, that served a group of women who had otherwise been overlooked by high fashion, died on Dec. 8 at her home in Lakeland, Fla. She was 82.
The death was confirmed by her son Brett Radmin.
For most of her life, Nancye Radmin hovered around a size 8 and preferred wearing fine fabrics like cashmere and jacquard. But by her second pregnancy, in 1976, she had gained 80 pounds and was a size 16. When she went shopping at her favorite stores in Manhattan for some new clothes, she was shocked to find that there were only polyester pants and boxy sweaters in her size.
“Fat,” she told Newsweek in 1991, “was the F word of fashion.”
“Absolutely nothing stylish was available,” she added. “I just knew I wasn’t the only fat woman in New York.”
With $10,000 she borrowed from her husband, Radmin looked to start her own business — a boutique stocked with the kind of upscale clothes she wanted to wear.
In 1977 she opened the Forgotten Woman at 888 Lexington Ave. on the fashionable Upper East Side. The store’s name was a reference to her clientele, women who wore larger sizes than most fashion designers manufactured — and,
perhaps, to a culture that overlooked them, too.
By 1991 she had 25 shops around the country, with annual sales of $40 million.
Nancye Jo Bullard was born on Aug. 4, 1938, in Nashville, Tenn., to Joe and Jane ( Johnson) Bullard. She grew up on her father’s farm in Cochran, Ga., where he harvested peanuts and cotton. Her mother was a registered nurse.
In1967 she met Mack Radmin, a widower 23 years her senior who was in the kosher meat business. She converted to Judaism for him (she had been raised Southern Baptist), and they married in 1968.
He died in 1996. In addition to son Brett, she is survived by another son, William Kyle Radmin; two sisters, Michelle Moody and Cheryle Janelli; and four grandchildren.