What Happened To Body Inclusivity In Fashion?

In December of last year, Vogue dropped a special digital-only cover celebrating Zac Posen’s appointment at Gap featuring seven models. “Creativity for everyone,” it trumpeted on the sub-headline. 

Except, uh…where was the “everyone” Vogue spoke of? I personally had to triple check the date on the post to make sure the cover shoot had happened in 2024, so much did it resemble the thin Vogue covers I remembered from the mid-aughts, all sharp jaws and collarbones and hipbones. (Oh wait: There, with her body tucked almost completely out of view, was Devyn Garcia, the only non-straight-sized model on the cover.)

As a fashion editor with over a decade of experience, I’ve come to understand, if not quite excuse, the lack of plus-size representation in high fashion editorials. After all, if runway samples are only made in straight sizes, opportunities are limited. But this cover was talking about the freakin’ Gap — and not the cool Gap of the late '90s, even, but the Gap of 2024, which is struggling to compete in an increasingly oversaturated market and which, according to its website, offers sizes up to a 20. I find it challenging to grasp why there wasn’t better body representation on a cover touting creativity for everyone, to say the least. (We've reached out to Vogue for comment and didn't hear back.)

Opportunities for plus-sized models in fashion are disappearing at an alarming rate: During the spring/summer 2020 season, 86 plus-size models walked runways across all four major cities, a tremendous improvement that accounted for 2.8% of all models; by spring/summer 2025, that had plummeted to 0.8% percent. (Around 4% were “midsize,” a term to describe sizes 6-12 that has yet to really catch on within an industry that prefers to consider any size over 4 to be “plus.”)  In her newsletter Line Sheet, fashion journalist Lauren Sherman noted that, “Anecdotally, agents are seeing more specs for models sized 6/8 or 8/10 (known as mid-size) instead of 16, 18, 20.”

“If we look back at recent history, over the past 10 years, it went from no plus-size models on the runway to a few plus-size supermodel on the runway,” says model Lauren Chan, citing names like Ashley Graham and Jill Kortlev as success stories. “We got to a really exciting place where we were seeing what we call ‘new face plus-size models’ who were having their first season, who were relative unknowns before that. Designers were putting them on exclusives — that’s the treatment that straight-size models get, and that’s how they build careers in high fashion... I’ve realized that that's pretty much stopped.”

Those who have been pushing for better body representation in the fashion industry — like myself — have found ourselves wondering how we got back here. There were signs: The Miu Miu Spring 2022 collection, which largely featured very thin models to show off the Abercrombie-core ultra-mini skirts; the quiet retreat of high fashion and mall brands alike from offering size extensions in their clothes, citing financial concerns in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic; and, of course, the rise and rise and rise of GLP-1s like Ozempic.

It’s that latter piece of the puzzle which has particularly seemed to bring pop culture as a whole screeching back to the standards of thinness which dominated the early aughts. Not that being thin ever truly disappeared as a value in Western society, but rather, people feel comfortable saying the quiet parts out loud again — we see it regularly on TikTok and X.

“The Ozempic issue is so much larger than fashion, and I think that’s what makes it so dangerous,” says Ruthie Friedlander, co-founder of The Chain, a non-profit dedicated to eating disorder advocacy in the fields of fashion and entertainment. “We talked about it last year at awards season, and it's impossible to ignore. It's basically attributing to this resurgence of what the ideal body image looks like, except now, you don't have to starve yourself — you can just give yourself a shot. That's a really dangerous environment to put anybody in, especially with people with eating disorders.”

It’s become almost shockingly easy to get a prescription to a GLP-1 like Ozempic, whether through telemedicine or online start-ups — a marked difference from trying to get almost any other prescription medication on the market. (“My heart medication, I spend, and I'm not even joking, hours a month trying to get these refills, a ton of time and money on medications that aren’t covered by my insurance. But Hims and Hers is sending me advertisements about how to get weight loss shots. I find that to be blood-curdling,” Friedlander says.)

It’s the biggest dirty not-so-secret in fashion that people are taking a GLP-1 to lose those last five to ten pounds that might take them to the next size down — or, as I overheard someone say at a show last fashion week, people across the industry are “‘Zemped up.” And the obsession with weight loss is extending beyond our own bodies, as The Chain co-founder Christina Grasso points out. 

“The entire discourse that has opened up about Ozempic and similar drugs has really given people the permission to freely comment on people's bodies again. For a while, it got better, but now I feel like it's just kind of a free for all,” she says. “An obsession with female thinness is not about beauty, it's about obedience. With everything going on in our world right now, that also might have something to do with it: If women can take up less space and be so much more obsessed with something that’s so meaningless, like the size of our bodies, then we're missing everything that's happening that actually does matter.”

The inevitable trickle-down effect — that aforementioned sample size quandary that impacts who gets access to fashion — worsens for everyone. Designers are making clothes that fit smaller bodies, which means models need to be smaller. The ones featured in campaigns are smaller, the ones on covers are smaller, the samples available to loan to them and to influencers are smaller. It's a little nesting doll that disappears down into nothing but size 000 bullshit.

Maybe it’s good that the industry is going mask-off again. The lack of, quite frankly, token representation is clearing space for brands and designers and influencers actually invested in improving the state of things rather than checking off a diversity box.

“I don't need, for my own personal body image and feelings of representation, to see Gucci or Burberry or Prada have one singular plus-size model as a stunt,” Chan says. “I feel much more accepted, seen, valued as a customer and a person when a brand like Sinéad O’Dwyer casts across many spectrums of marginalized people. That makes for a brand that I want to shop from and give my hard-earned money to.”

Chan also cites designers like Ester Manas, Ellie Misner, and Karoline Vitto; Grasso praises the work of Nadège Vanhée at Hermès on the side of established houses. Things aren’t all negative, to be sure — even the fact that I’m able to write a piece like this, or that I’ve seen similar questions raised in the New York Times and The Cut, speaks to a kind of momentum of its own.

“I think it's a sign of progress that we're even having these conversations amid the rise of weight loss drugs, because I would bet that had this happened in the early aughts, we wouldn't have been able, as a media industry, as a culture, to have conversations as dynamic as what's going on with the state of body diversity,” Chan says. “So, although we're in a regression of size inclusion, it’s still progress that we’re having these conversations; we’re still a step ahead in the game of two steps forward, one step back.”

Still, it would be nice if everyone in the fashion industry got back with the program and reinvested in body inclusivity across all fields. Instead, it feels like I’m in an echo chamber with the same advocates and critics who have been shouting about this since I started out in the industry. For an industry which purports itself to be forward-thinking, this kind of regression towards the old status quo isn't just ignorant — it's boring. 

As another fashion month is set to kick off in New York, hopefully that conversation moves back to the top of our collective mind. As Friedlander more bluntly says: “I really hope that in 2025, people feel more comfortable having hard conversations about this, because it's going to be the difference between fashion remaining solvent and creative and interesting — and I mean that both from like a luxury perspective and a non luxury perspective. I hope people stop being fucking pussies and start asking us questions about how to do that.”