Harper Greer Designer Plus Size Clothing

The Bay Area was thrown more than a little Hollywood gold dust on Sunday night. Not only did Pixar's "Wall-E", co-written by Piedmont residents Pete Doctor and Jim Reardon, win the best Animated Feature Award, but "Milk", a film about the gay-rights advocate and San Francisco Supervisor, Harvey Milk, led to a Best Actor award for Sean Penn as well as Best Original Screenplay for Dustin Lance Black.

However, Piedmonters can take an extra bit of pride in the occassion, knowing that one of their own were working behind the scenes to make sure those in attendance were looking their best as well.

Piedmont resident, Terry Kiskaddon dressed Harvey Milk's real-life campaing manager, Anne Kronenberg, for the occassion. Kronenberg has been a regular customer at Kiskaddon's San Francisco based store, Harper Greer, for some time now.

"She came in and asked us to make her a dress to wear to the Oscars about a week before the event!" said Kiskaddon, who designed a black silk double georgette dress and matching jacket trimmed with Swarovski crystals. It was Kiskaddon's first time designing for an Academy Awards attendee. She and her family were thrilled to catch a glimpse of Kronenberg's dress on the red carpet that evening.

"There were so many people coming down for awards, we only caught a glimpse of the shoulder of her jacket but we knew it was our dress." Kiskaddon said with a laugh.

She and her husband John, who plays with a local group the JazzKatz, have owned the store formore than 25 years. Kiskaddon originally began designing for sizes 6-10 but switched her format to plus sizes (12-26) after her mother-in-law suggested it would be a good niche.

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I love working with my plus-size clients because the before and after results tend to be so dramatic. My client Mary, a senior associate at a large Washington-based law firm, who falls between a size 16 and size 18, thought that covering up was her best strategy. While she was hiding her curves, she was also hiding from life. Accepting her body the way it is today – not ten or twenty pounds lighter sometime in the future – was the first step to her transformation. The second step was to visit the wonderful plus-size shop, Harper Greer, while on a business trip to San Francisco.

Knowing that Mary was going to be in town, I called ahead and spoke with Sales Manager John Kiskaddon about Mary’s shape, personality and color palette. In no time John assembled a number of outfits Mary didn’t just like – she loved them. She also loved shopping in a store where she didn’t feel the need to apologize for not being a size 10 or 12.

Don’t fret if you can’t get to San Francisco to shop. Harper Greer does a fabulous mail-order business and provides fabric swatches on request. Below are a few sketches from their new suit collection available now in sizes 12-26.

Women who are not size 6,7, or 8 but rather 16,17, 18, and beyond are having an easier time finding attractive and chic clothes than they did in the past. Only a few decades ago ample women had only two sartorial choices: Look like a frump in a tent dress or learn how to sew.

Twenty-six years ago, Terry Kiskaddon started Harper Greer as a wholesale business for "average-sized" women. By the way, the store name came from a baby name book. "I was 20 at the time and I thought it sounded glamourous," she recalls. Six years after she had opened her wholesale business, destiny came along in the form of a new husband, John, and a mother-in-law, Lillian. A luxury-sized woman with a keen sense of fashion, Lillian had a difficult time finding clothes that were both stylish and beautiful. That's when the Kiskaddons realized they had found their niche.

Harper Greer was transformed into a retail shop for ladies size 14 and up. Their first location was in San Francisco's fashionable SoMa district.

Terry Kiskaddon, and excellent seamstress since childhood, designs all the clothes. "Customers are really impressed with the quality of the fabric," she says. "We use wool, tencel, rayon, linen, cotton, and Indian silk (called dupioni). We also have a wonderful in-house tailor and pattern maker."

Besides the lovely, unique clothes, Harper Greer's success is built on its exemplary service. "We got a letter from someone who purchased something from us years ago, they had lost a button," explains Kiskaddon. Luckily for the customer, the store keeps an extensive database of customer's purchases and preferences and replaced the button. "The woman was impressed. We do things like that everyday."

Harper Greer Press

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