Big-and-Tall Men's Clothing: Our Shopping Experience

Shopping for clothes for men can be a challenging venture any time, especially if your man falls in the big-and-tall category like mine does. Where do you begin to find big and tall (not just big or just tall) clothing that fits well, is well-made, of good quality and is not ridiculously expensive?

For my big and tall husband, we started with Wal-Mart simply for the convenience factor, plus the likelihood of a low cost factor overall. The first thing we learned about big and tall shopping at Wal-Mart is that there are not many choices in big and tall sizes. There are a few, yes, but not much beyond one option for tshirts and one option for jeans. In this case of big and tall shopping, we were looking for jeans and work clothes for my husband. Work clothes for him mean dress pants and polo-style shirts. So we left Wal-Mart empty-handed and discussed our other options for big and tall clothes.

The next thing we decided to try in our big and tall clothing search was to order from King Size Direct, a big and tall mail order company. We saw a commercial on television one day then went online to order a catalog sent to our home. The options for big and tall sizes were wide-ranging, much larger than any place I had seen to date. Not only were there many options for all kinds of clothing, from dress shirts to warm-up suits, but the actual sizes were wide-ranging as well. This is definitely a good feature in big and tall merchandise.

We ordered gym shorts and T-shirts from this company, as we were afraid to order more complicated and also more expensive dress clothes without the benefit of trying them on in person, or at least checking out the company's big and tall clothing quality first. The big and tall gym shorts were a good fit, the size was on target, something that is not to be taken for granted! The quality of the material the big and tall jersey-like shorts were made from was good-thick enough not to stretch terribly yet thin enough to be comfortable. The big and tall men's tshirts, however, were not as well made, in our opinion. The material was thin and stretchy, so much so that the shirts feel far too thin. There were many loose and dangling threads on the shirt sleeves and hems. This, to me, suggested a hastily made even inferior quality big and tall product.

Our biggest problem with the big and tall order from King Size Direct was the thin-ness of the tshirts. It is hard to describe, but the issue was enough of a problem for us that not only will we not be ordering any more big and tall tshirts from King Size Direct, we will not take a gamble on any of their other big and tall clothing items, either.

So the search for quality, affordable big and tall men's clothing continued for us. My husband made do with what big and tall options we found, even though they were not to his liking, while we kept our eyes and ears open for other ideas. The option that finally worked well for us in our big and tall clothing quest was one we stumbled upon by accident.

While shopping for myself(that would be the short and wide section!) one afternoon in JCPenney's in Evansville, Indiana, I noticed a sign for a 'big and tall men's clothing' section. Naturally, my interest was quite piqued! We had, in a prior big and tall clothing search, looked at JCPenney's, Sears, Dillards and other department stores in another town to no avail. This particular JCPenney's was quite a large store, two stories with escalators-and, as it would turn out, a quite good sized big and tall men's clothing section! I immediately bought one big and tall polo-style shirt('xlt'. to be exact on how the big and tall polo-style shirts are marked at JCPenney's) and one pair of khaki Docker pants to take home for my big and tall husband to try. Let me just say we celebrated the big and tall find and the very next weekend, made the short trip back to Evansville's JCPenney's for an entire big and tall wardrobe for my husband. A big and tall work wardrobe as well as casual and sports big and tall clothing as well-even the right size big and tall belts were found there! Bonus being that the great big and tall clothing selection was of very good quality and priced quite reasonably-especially with sale pricing as well.

That wonderful, quality and affordable big and tall clothing gold mine find of ours was 4 years ago and we are still devout JCPenney customers, buying not only my big and tall husband's clothing there, but our big and tall son's clothing and shoes as well!

Hopefully this article about shopping for big-and-tall men's clothing will give other folks out there some ideas and successful big-and-tall clothing finds.