These Department Stores Are Trans-Friendly

Remember awhile back when Styleite's Ashley Hoffman reported on the fitting room policies for high street stores like Zara, Urban Outfitters, and H&M? She found that plenty of the stores were happy to accommodate all customers regardless of gender identity, while others were, well, a little less tolerant (I'm giving Zara the side-eye right now). This week, Hoffman repeated the experiment, this time researching the fitting room policies at luxury department stores. Thankfully, the results are pretty encouraging.

The Styleite team cold-called swanky department stores in New York, West Virginia, Rhode Island, and Texas and spoke to sales associates "to see if they could ensure access to transgender people who needed to try on designer womenswear." Some of the associates were definitely confused, like the Dolce & Gabbana representative at Saks who said, "What?" when asked if transgender individuals have access to the fitting rooms. But overall, each store expressed a willingness to accommodate any customer. Check out some of the responses below.

Nordstrom in Austin, Texas:

It’s whatever makes people feel comfortable so if they feel more comfortable up in the women’s room, there’s no problem with that at all. I can’t speak on behalf of the other customers, but as a company we’re not one to discriminate so there shouldn’t be any problem.

Bloomingdales in Rhode Island:

Honestly we have no policy. Anybody can come in and use our fitting room anytime they would like to.

Saks Fifth Avenue (Chanel department)

Our fitting rooms are open to anyone. The women’s fitting room is by the Chanel stockroom, so it doesn’t matter if it’s a male of female who was a man needs to change [...] we have several very good male clients in Chanel.

Okay, so the Chanel person at Saks definitely needs to work on that wording (a transgender woman is not a man, period). Still, I'm glad to see a distinct lack of discrimination coming from these stores. There's no accounting for what actually goes on when transgender folks hit up Bergdorf's for their Gucci fix, but at least we know that the official policies are cheerfully inclusive.

Image: Giphy