Nobody's body is an amorphous blob, male or female.

It's simply a matter of design and convention - clothes are designed to fit some body types, and conventional clothing styles are predicated on "degrees of freedom" of possible design that can only comfortably suit some body types without looking like a tent or a gorilla suit.

Actually "male" formal styles have more give in their degrees of freedom than informal styles for either gender, or formal styles for women, because fat men have often been suit wearers.

Still, IMO, designers ought to see "fat people of any sex" as a challenge to their ingenuity. I'd really like to see what people would come up with if effort was applied, rather than merely shifting the proportions of something designed for thin people.

Mid-high end brands build their clothes to an aspirational fit model. Most people are forced to make that fit work for them, either through tailoring, or optimizing around what attributes of their clothing are important to them. Fashion is pretty backwards on fit - bottom line is wear your clothes the way you want to wear them, swag or no swag.

Upvoted. You made some great points.

I feel your pain, but I don't see how the recommendations would change for blobby men. The only issue for blobby men following these recommendations is that it's really hard to achieve the desired results with off-the-shelf clothing.

For example: IMO, most big-bellied men shouldn't be tucking-in a dress shirt unless they're required to. A better-looking alternative would be to buy a dress shirt that's one size larger than what's needed and wear it untucked.

The problem I have with dress shirts - as someone who "shouldn't" tuck them in - is that by virtue of being dress shirts, they are longer because they are designed to be tucked in. Casual shirts are generally OK.

Plus, going a size larger doesn't hide my belly as much as I think it does.

As noted by another poster: I'm better off working on the belly than finding the right length shirts and debating tucked in vs out!

And going the other way, once you get a bit of muscle clothes don't fit anymore.

I'm not thin and never will be. Even when I worked out 6 days a week for 2-3 hours a day, had a resting pulse of 46 and a body fat percentage under 10% I was still built like a square.

Ignore this claptrap. Find good rules that fit your body within the following guidelines:

1 - shoulder fit is important, nothing says you don't know how to dress yourself like bad shoulder fit. This works for T-shirts to tuxedos

2 - sleeve length is important

3 - find comfortable pants you look decent in, don't hide anything, just fit in them well. What you wear up top is far more important than what you wear on the bottom

"Before we jump in, let us note that clothes best flatter a fit body. "

I'd say the statement in the article is more accurate. Fit rather than thin. And if you are not fit I'm thinking it would be better to work on that before the fashion.

Here's how to fix that: http://www.leangains.com/

Do the clothes serve the wearer, or does the wearer serve the clothes?

Ah, but the servant waits...

That doesn't fix the immediate problem of dressing nicely while being overweight.

Also, some people are overweight due to, e.g., medical issues and the consumption of medication needed to deal with said medical issues.

Would leangains.com help them too?

Everytime I see an overweight person who's wearing nice clothes that fit well, I don't see an overweight person. That is, the well-fitting clothes take away from their being overweight almost completely, at least in my perspective. You do make a good point, however, that those folks would probably want to untuck their shirts.

While I study biochemistry in school, I will not pretend to be able to give medical advice, so I can't answer your question with regards to medication. However, for those overweight folks who just haven't been tending to their diet and exercise as much as they'd like, leangains and a good strength-training program is a fantastic way to shed fat and become more "fit." Although, if you're really interested in getting involved, I personally believe http://rippedbody.jp to be a better resource for the information on leangains (although leangains.com is the original source), simply because it's better organized and more straightforward.

The amount of weight one gains due to medical problems seems to be overestimated. I mean, there are medications out there that will hammer your metabolism. But then again, your average guy with Hypothyroidism, high blood pressure and below average testosterone levels won't take such medications.

A friend of mine has Hypothyroidism and he attributes gaining nearly 100 lbs to that because his doctor told him that might be the effect of it beeing not treated for so long.

I find that pretty silly. It may add some water weight and another 10 lbs due to that and skew the balance between lean body mass and fat. But the body has to follow the laws of physics and adding 100 lbs of mass in fat requires massive amounts of calories above your daily expenditure for extended periods of time.