Plus-size clothes are disappearing in the Ozempic era

Tess Holliday remembers 2019 as a "glorious" year for plus-size fashion and body positivity. The plus-size model and body activist walked the runway at New York Fashion Week. She'd been featured by magazines such as Cosmopolitan UK, Nylon, and Self. The cultural shift felt palpable — Rihanna's Savage X Fenty runway show made headlines for the size diversity of its models, and Lizzo was topping the charts with catchy songs and a message of empowerment. "It finally felt like we were in a place where that was the norm," Holliday says.

That optimistic new norm, however, was short-lived. The pandemic — and all the Zoom calls — had people picking their appearance apart. Some major brands that had made forays into the plus-size realm scaled back. Then came Ozempic and the rise of GLP-1 weight-loss drugs, promising miracles that could move shoppers out of the plus-size section entirely.

"I don't really see it getting better or shifting to a place where we are maybe hearing the term body positivity and seeing brands promote it in the way that they were," says Holliday, the author of the coming book "Take Up Space, Y'all: Your Bold & Bright Guide to Self-Love." "I mean, look at what happened with the backswing of diversity and inclusivity."

Thin is in, culturally, and the fashion industry is happy to oblige. Manufacturing plus-size clothes presents unique operational challenges that many brands would rather avoid. Weight-loss drugs are slimming down some proportion of the population and may be changing inventory mixes in turn. Many fashion retailers and companies have never been thrilled about catering to plus-size clients — even though about two-thirds of American women are estimated to fall into that category — so they're happy to have a reason to turn away.

"I'm just convinced at this point that they just want us running around naked," Holliday says.

Even before the GLP-1 explosion, brands that ventured into the plus-size market were already backing off. (I'll focus largely on women's fashion for this story, because that's where much of the spending and offerings are.) In 2021, Loft discontinued its plus-size options just three years after launching its first plus-size collection, citing "ongoing business challenges." In 2022, Old Navy said it would pull some options from its stores, about a year after making a big deal about its efforts to place all sizes together on the sales floor instead of separating sections. The retailer still has plus-size clothing, it's just mostly online. In June, the plus-size retailer Torrid announced plans to close up to 180 stores.

Lauren Hope Krass, the host of "Belly Laughs," a body acceptance podcast, and a web series called "Fat Fashion," tells me the Loft pullback hurt a lot because a lot of what the brand offers is business casual clothing. "You'll hear a lot of plus-size shoppers complain about, 'Well, we want sexy clothes, too.' And that is so true, but if you think about the country, we're business bitches, we're going to work," she says. "It's honestly really discouraging because we're seeing a loss of entire brands and companies go under."

Anecdotally, plus-size shoppers and influencers say they've noticed a pullback in merchandise from a variety of retailers, including H&M. In addition to sharp-eyed shoppers, there's data to show that the extended-size clothing options are getting harder to find. In a 2024 report, the retail intelligence firm Edited found that the clothing retailer Aritzia had cut the share of 2XL dresses among its new arrivals by 5 percentage points from 2023 while upping it in many smaller sizes. ASOS similarly reduced its plus-size assortment by 15% from the previous year, the report found, and Reformation reduced its extended sizing range by 46%. A separate 2024 report from the merchandising and inventory consultancy Impact Analytics looked at Manhattan's Upper East Side, an affluent neighborhood where GLP-1s for weight loss were prominent, and found that sales in smaller sizes for women's button-down shirts increased by 12% for local fashion retailers from 2022 to 2024, while sales of larger sizes fell by just slightly less. Impact Analytics found a similar, albeit less pronounced, trend for men. Executives at Lafayette 148, Rent the Runway, and Amarra told The Wall Street Journal last year that they'd spotted an uptick in customers switching to smaller sizes.

The authors of Edited's report note that it's not clear whether Ozempic can be directly linked to increased demand for smaller sizes. Trendy weight-loss solutions are often coming and going, and only a tiny sliver of Americans are taking GLP-1s. But the fashion industry was already shifting away from plus size when the drugs hit the zeitgeist, and a scenario in which people lose weight and have to buy new clothes (and perhaps gain the weight back and have to buy more new clothes) is a great one for retailers.

"It's a breakthrough miracle drug for people who really need to lose weight, 100%. But I don't think it's going to make everybody a Size 8 all of a sudden," says Danielle Malconian, the CEO of the plus-size apparel brand Vikki Vi and the online retailer Plus by Design. "It's an easy thing for retailers to kind of jump out of the space because it is service-based. It is hard; it's not sexy all the time."

As mentioned, the majority of the country counts as plus size. For women in the US, that means those who wear a Size 14 and up. Plus-size consumers have a lot of money to spend, but that's easier said than done.

"They have the most beautiful shoes and handbags of everybody in the world, and they get so frustrated that they can't find clothing to spend money on," Malconian says.

The fashion industry has long been hesitant to cater to plus-size customers. That's for a variety of reasons — some logistical, some cultural, some discriminatory.

Designing and manufacturing for plus-size customers can be more costly and intensive than for what are called "straight sizes," the industry term for the sizes you always find on the rack. Designers and brands often use one standard-size fit model and then scale up and down from there. But that gets harder to do in bigger sizes because of how differently people may carry their weight.

"When you're making plus sizes, you have to be really concerned about fit, and when you're dealing with a plus-size customer, you're dealing with a lot of shapes of bodies," Malconian says. "You want to have not just one fit model, but maybe three or four fit models to really understand what's going to fit, or else you end up with a bunch of returns and you go out of business."

Other material calculations make retailers less inclined to sell plus-size clothing: It requires more fabric, meaning it's more expensive to make. Retailers are hesitant to charge more for larger sizes, so they may order fewer units to put in their stores, if they carry them at all. E-commerce makes this all a little easier because it allows retailers to respond as orders come in.

"With online, we've been able to offer more inclusive sizes because we don't stock the inventory on our balance sheet, and we have the vendor cut it based on demand," says Shawn Grain Carter, a luxury branding and retail consultant who's an associate professor at the Fashion Institute of Technology. "If they don't buy it, no harm, no foul, because you had that excess fabric sitting there."

To be sure, the downsizing of plus-size options is not just about logistical hurdles. Historically, the fashion industry has always prioritized being thin, and it caters to that clientele accordingly.

Krass attributes the resistance to embracing plus-size fashion to plain "fatphobia." "I do get so annoyed when people are like, 'Oh, our plus-size brands are going to go under, there's no more fat people,'" she says. "And it's like, no, plus-size brands might go under due to fatphobia, not due to lack of fat people. We are here, and we should be here and should have the dignity of having access to fashion."

Culturally and economically, plus-size people are often pushed to the side. Plus-size sections are often hidden away in stores. Brands that sell plus-size clothing often market them almost covertly. The vast majority of their Instagram posts and social media show straight-size models, even if they have plus-size merchandise. And the supposed plus-size models they do use are often still much thinner than their actual plus-size customers, who may not even really realize they're being targeted because models don't look like them in the ads.

"A lot of plus-size brands will default to showing Size 14 models, Size 14 people. To me, that's the midsize range," Krass says. "They can shop straight sizes, so why are you catering to them for plus sizes? Get some thicker models, and we'll know, and then we'll shop."

Vogue Business' Autumn/Winter 2025 size inclusivity report found that while "curvaceous silhouettes" were all over fashion show runways, curvy models were not.

"We're in danger of creating a false narrative yet again, stating that the only way one can look beautiful is to be skinny," Carter says.

There are, of course, brands that have figured out that plus-size people have money and cater to them accordingly. Holliday points to Universal Standard, ASOS, and Eloquii as brands getting it right on plus size, though many more brands are "doing it wrong," she says. Krass points out that resale and thrifting can be especially popular among plus-size shoppers, especially as brands pull back on new merchandise.

Ozempic and other GLP-1s may change the lay of the land in plus-size fashion, but it's not going to make the need for such options obsolete. These medications are not widely available and accessible. They're costly and often not covered by insurance. And they're not for everyone — they have a lot of side effects, and one study found that more than half of the people who take them for weight loss quit within a year.

"With everybody suddenly being like, 'Oh, everybody can be skinny now.' If they could all be skinny, why are there still fat people?" Holliday says.

While GLP-1s won't get rid of obesity, they could make it easier for brands and retailers to ignore heavier people. The fashion industry wants to be aspirational, and American culture aspires to skinny, even if that's not realistic or even savvy business-wise.

"Why, when we go in stores, is our stuff all the way in the back, hidden in a corner?" Holliday says. "Is that Mounjaro's fault? No."

Emily Stewart is a senior correspondent at Business Insider, writing about business and the economy.

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