'Fat girl costumes' for Halloween are more offensive than terrifying

As if choosing a Halloween outfit isn't already hard enough for women — exactly how much skin is your outfit permitted to show off, anyway? — a US retailer has made it even more unpleasant by labelling its plus-size customers "fat".

Jezebel received a tip-off from a reader noting that Walmart's online store offered a section titled "Fat girl costumes".

The costumes included in the section, such as "vampire", "saloon girl" and "clown", weren't intended to make slimmer women appear larger. The costumes were for plus-size adult women — and, unsurprisingly, a lot of people were pretty upset about the "fat" tag.

Sooo @Walmart has a "Fat Girl Costume" department. #awful http://t.co/RRaD86Y8OB

— Lisa Guerrero (@4lisaguerrero) October 27, 2014

SHAME ON YOU @walmart !!!! Someone should be fired!! >> Fat Girl Costumes : Halloween - http://t.co/qxwRUHGYTe http://t.co/83YddYPjEV

— Cheryl Oppenheim (@CherylOpp) October 27, 2014

Wow. How idiotic. Walmart's Website Features a Section of "Fat Girl Costumes" http://t.co/QzPiEoMRYR

— Diana M. Rodriguez (@DCgal62) October 27, 2014

"Truly the hottest of messes," Jezebel dubbed Walmart's whole costume section, speculating that a web developer may have created the "fat girl" section as a joke and then neglected to change it before it went live to the public.

The "fat girl costumes" section has since been taken off the site.

Walmart spokesman Ravi Jariwala told BuzzFeed News that "our teams immediately engaged [to remove the section]" after outrage bubbled across social media sites.

The retailer issued a mea culpa via Twitter, telling customers "this should have never been on our site and we apologise. We quickly removed it and made sure to not let it happen again."

(By the way, Lindsay Lohan solved question posed in the first paragraph more than a decade ago. As every good Mean Girls fan knows, "Halloween is the one day a year when a girl can dress up like a total slut and no other girls can say anything else about it." So there.)

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