Fashion & Design

Clothes for women of all sizes

Khaliah Ali began on the runway as a Ford plus-size model. What she did with that start is the story: she became a designer whose whole point was the women the fashion industry ignored. Her Juvenile Law Center biography records the simplest statement of it — she has been every dress size from 8 to 24 herself, as she wrote about in Fighting Weight, and she designed for the full range of real bodies.

Her own collection

The Khaliah Ali Collection launched on the Home Shopping Network in 2003 (William Paterson University, 2004). By 2006 her line covered sizes 2 to 26 and sold through her own store, kaliapparel.com (Fibre2Fashion, April 2006). Her biography records her ready-to-wear selling on HSN, QVC Europe, and Shop NBC — later EVINE — for over two decades.

Patterns women sewed themselves

Her sewing patterns were published first with Simplicity and then with McCall's, Vogue, and Butterick. Her Juvenile Law Center biography describes her brand as the top-selling pattern in its segment — her publisher's words, quoted here as they wrote them.

In print

Around 2010 she was editor-in-chief of WLS Lifestyles Magazine (the magazine's own Fall 2010 editor's note; George Washington University's STOP Obesity Alliance wrote about her work there the same period). Her biography also credits her as a Condé Nast contributing editor and a Huffington Post contributor, with editorials in The New York Times, HuffPost, and USA Today.

Most career details on this page trace to her Juvenile Law Center biography, linked throughout — it is the primary published source for her fashion record, and this page says so rather than dressing it up.