Before fashion sells you a dress, it decides whether you deserve to wear one.
That decision has been made quietly, consistently and without apology for as long as the industry has existed. It is made in the sample sizes sent to casting calls, in the measurements written into design briefs, in the bodies that appear on covers and the bodies that do not. Nobody announces it. Nobody has to. The clothes themselves do the talking.
In the 1950s the talking was done in the language of the hourglass. Postwar abundance had returned and the female body was expected to reflect that, cinched at the waist, full at the hip, generous at the bust. Marilyn Monroe and Elizabeth Taylor were the faces of that decade and their bodies were its architecture. Playboy launched in 1953. Barbie followed in 1959. Both drew from the same blueprint. The corset had technically gone but the girdle had taken its place, and the purpose was identical: the body needed correcting before it could be acceptable.
Then in 1966 a seventeen year old girl from London named Lesley Lawson walked into the fashion world and the hourglass was over. Twiggy, as she became known globally, had a frame so slight that the industry immediately reorganised itself around it. What had been desirable eight years earlier was now quietly retired. Twiggy said years later that she was simply built that way, that she ate, that she inherited her father’s build. She was telling the truth. The industry had taken her natural body, held it above every other natural body and called it the ideal, and said absolutely nothing about the rise in eating disorders happening across the same years in the same countries where her image was plastered on every magazine page. It moved to the next look instead.
The 1980s arrived with Jane Fonda and the aerobics era, lean and athletic, the gym becoming a moral institution. That lasted until Calvin Klein put Kate Moss in a campaign in 1993 and the decade decided that gaunt was the direction. Heroin chic was the name the press gave it, pale skin, hollow cheekbones, a body that looked like it had not eaten in weeks, and the name was accurate enough that Bill Clinton addressed it from the White House and called it a glamorisation of addiction. The Los Angeles Times wrote that the fashion industry had developed a nihilistic vision of beauty. The industry absorbed the criticism and continued casting the same bodies for another ten years.
After that came the Victoria’s Secret era, tall and thin with specific curves, the kind achieved through a combination of exceptional genetics, intensive training and in many cases surgical procedure, broadcast into living rooms across the world in prime-time television specials watched by hundreds of millions of people. The message was clear and it was not subtle. A body could be acceptable only if it arrived already edited.
The resistance did not come from inside the industry. It never does. Ashley Graham spent years being told by agents and clients that her body was the problem before she walked for Michael Kors at New York Fashion Week and proved the opposite. Her Sports Illustrated cover in 2016 sold. The industry noticed that. Not because it had developed a conscience but because it had developed an awareness of a market it had been ignoring. Paloma Elsesser came through and pushed further, demanding that the brands featuring her in campaigns actually produce and sell their garments in her size. She understood that a photograph of a plus-size model wearing a dress that no customer can actually buy is not representation. It is decoration.
By the late 2010s there was genuine movement. Ashley Graham, Tess Holliday, Iskra Lawrence, Danielle Brooks and others had built real platforms and forced real conversations. British Vogue put Jill Cortleve, Precious Lee and Paloma Elsesser on its April 2023 cover. New York Fashion Week that year featured 70 plus-size models across its runway shows. Brands were expanding their size ranges and speaking publicly about inclusion. For a moment it looked like the industry had genuinely shifted.
Then Ozempic changed the bodies of the people who could afford it and fashion followed without hesitation.
By the Spring/Summer 2025 season, New York Fashion Week had gone from 70 plus-size models to 23. London dropped from 80 to 26. Vogue Business analysed every runway show across all four major fashion weeks and found that less than 1% of the 8,700 models that season were plus size, and over 94% were between a US size 0 and 4. Models who had been working at sizes 16 and 18 were being asked to return to size 12 or lose their bookings. Some did. The editorial director of British Vogue, Chioma Nnadi, went on BBC Radio 4 and said she was very concerned, that the pendulum had swung back to skinny being in, and that fashion keeps treating these things as trends when they should never be trends.
A model named Skye Standley said what many people had been thinking since the whole cycle began: that the inclusivity movement had been largely performative, and that performative attitudes are easily abandoned.
That is the honest summary of what happened. The body positivity movement was real. The women who built it did so with genuine courage and at real personal cost inside an industry that had spent decades telling them their bodies were problems to be solved. What the industry gave back was a marketing strategy, maintained for as long as the plus-size consumer represented untapped revenue, and quietly dropped when a pharmaceutical drug made thinness accessible again to the people the industry had always preferred.
Every decade, a different body. Every decade, the same logic underneath it. The body that gets to exist in fashion is the body that serves the industry’s current commercial interest, dressed up as taste, as beauty, as whatever happens to be natural and aspirational right now. The women whose bodies fit the current specification are celebrated. The ones who do not are told to wait for their moment, which will arrive and pass and never actually belong to them.
Here is what we believe.
Slim varies. Plus varies. Every body is built differently and moves through life differently and carries its shape through health and illness and age and everything in between. None of that variation is a fashion statement and none of it should be treated as one. Every person deserves to find clothes that fit the body they actually have. Not the body the industry is currently approving of. Not the body they could have if they adjusted or corrected or injected. The one they wake up in every morning.
There is a man, Ashunter Lubega, who says something worth repeating here. He says the only person he truly knows is his wife, and that all his opinions about other people are assumptions, because he does not know them. The fashion industry has been building entire systems of judgement around bodies it does not know. It does not know the person inside the body. It does not know their health, history, genetics, or life. It sees a size and makes a decision, and that decision has been landing on real people, with real consequences, for a very long time.
A person’s body says nothing about who they are. It never has. And fashion, if it is serious about being anything other than a machine that tells people they are not enough, needs to start from that truth instead of endlessly circling away from it.
