Babe Hope thinks women who wear plus sizes should forget about dressing to look thinner and instead dress to look pretty.

(Wait a minute — there's a difference? Indeed there is, not that you'd know it from much of the fashion advice dished out to plus-size customers.)

After a lifetime of struggling to look acceptable, though fat, then deciding to give up on looking acceptable and go for looking fabulous, and then launching a business that helps other plus-size women decide how they want to look and shop for a wardrobe that delivers, she's written a book to show how it's done: "Pretty Plus: How to Look Sexy, Sensational, and Successful No Matter What You Weigh."

Even if you can get past the media-induced assumption that a woman who wears a size bigger than 4 owes the world an apology, it's not easy. For women who wear plus sizes, just finding clothes that fit is a major challenge. People store fat in different places in different ratios: You can have skinny arms and broad hips, or a round belly but relatively slender thighs, or a small waist but a big bust and hips.

Pretty much everybody knows that much. Even so, a patternmaker tasked with upsizing a dress pattern from a size 6 to a size 16 or 26 has little choice but to go by the averages. So, the bigger the size, the better the chance that it will fail to fit some crucial dimension of any given customer who (theoretically) wears that size.

This is why Lane Bryant's "Right Fit" jeans and trousers, cut for three different silhouettes, make so much sense. And it's why Hope advises her clients to have nine out of 10 garments they buy altered: It's the only way to have clothes that actually fit.

Another problem for women who wear plus sizes is how much of the fashion advice they get comes from fashion editors who, as a condition of employment, live on lettuce and therefore can't know what they're talking about. Sure, they may know how their readers would like to look, and they may be skilled at deploying optical illusions to that end — no horizontal stripes, etc. — but too often they don't quite get the obstacles their larger readers are up against.

Hope, having walked the walk, starts with function. For instance, when she gets to shoes, she begins with an analysis of your typical man's dress shoe — its materials, its weight, its architecture, its construction. It's designed, she points out, to support feet that need to carry the weight of a big man's body. Meanwhile, feet that carry the weight of a 200- or 300-pound woman are expected to do it in flimsy little slippers jacked up on stiletto heels. Her point isn't that it's unfair — we already knew that. It's that trying to carry that weight in those shoes is going to make your feet hurt, and that's going to show in the way you look (pained, tired), in the way you stand (tentative, off-balance) and in the way you move: You'll limp, hobble, lean on things like someone twice your age, thereby creating an impression more pitiful than fabulous.

So she tells you how to find shoes (she names brands and specifies styles) that, without looking ponderous or orthopedic, will let you move through the world with grace, energy and verve. She knows how because she's done it herself, and she's done it for clients. For starters, she wants you to have both feet measured by a pro. By the way, I suspect it's a typo when she says her left foot is 8.75 inches wide and her right is 9.5 inches wide. She must mean long. I'm pretty sure that even shoes that come in EE or WW widths don't fit feet nearly 10 inches wide. (The world needs more copy editors but, unfortunately, isn't willing to pay them.)

Along the same line, she recommends posture bras over minimizers: Appearing to have slightly bigger breasts is less detrimental to the general impression you create than looking all slumped-over and woe-is-me. Also, you breathe better when you sit and stand straight, so you get less tired, and look less tired.

When it comes to choosing clothes, her approach is to call attention to good features and camouflage less attractive ones while creating a silhouette that's balanced and harmonious. Which, as she makes clear, depends on understanding the body shape you're starting from. Then there's a whole system for figuring out which clothes you need to have in your closet so that, at a moment's notice, you can reliably pull together an outfit that will take you anywhere you need or want to go. Plus, good advice on how to shop, how to organize your clothes — and how to part with all the stuff in your closet that you never should've bought to begin with.

But what's most impressive about the book is its ambition: It goes way beyond offering to make large women look marginally thinner. Hope — her name couldn't be more appropriate — wants to change your way of being in the world, liberate you from your culturally induced sense that you need to be apologizing for yourself, free you to take pleasure in who you are and how you look. Brava!

Write to Patricia McLaughlin c/o Universal Uclick, 1130 Walnut St., Kansas City, MO 64106 or patsy.mcl@verizon.net.