Crescendo Apparel is a new fashion label for women who struggle to find stylish clothes that fit off the rack. The brand, which launched in August 2009, offers pants, skirts, dresses, tops, jackets and wraps designed specifically to fit and flatter women with small waists and full hips.

Typically, women with those proportions buy pants and skirts a size or two too large—to fit their hips—because there’s no better option. Then, they spend extra to take in the cavernous gap at the waist.

For many pear- and hourglass-shaped women, the dressing room can feel more like a war room. Only crying happens in this one. As one Crescendo client puts it: “After a lifetime of trying on clothes that don’t fit, you start to look in the dressing-room mirror and conclude:  ‘Whoever shaped me, shaped me wrong.’ ”

Other women look in that mirror and decide that they’re just not made for high fashion. The reality, of course, is that high fashion isn’t made for most women. In 2009, Crescendo was founded to change that.

Crescendo’s Founder and President Kathryn McKechnie understands her consumers’ dressing-room challenges so well because they’re her own challenges, too. The fashion enthusiast spent most of her adult life loving clothes that didn’t exactly love her—or her curvy figure—back.  So as a student of fashion merchandising, McKechnie decided to investigate.

She found that a mere 4 percent of American women have the narrow hips necessary for the straight, unforgiving cuts of most upscale design houses. Meanwhile, more than 64 percent of American women have waists at least 10 inches smaller than their hips, according to a 2003 survey by SizeUSA.

McKechnie always knew she had been left out of high fashion because of her figure. Now, she understood that the fashion industry was leaving out the clear majority of American women, too.  

McKechnie founded Crescendo Apparel in 2009 so that women could look in the mirror and, finally, see the truth: That whoever shaped them, shaped them beautiful.