Fashion
What was hoped to be a new wave of body positivity on the catwalks of the world’s fashion capitals is being swamped by a tide of Ozempic. By Megha Kapoor.
Ozempic and the new cult of thin
In my first week on the job as a fashion assistant at Vogue Australia, almost 15 years ago, I remember looking on wide-eyed as an editor poured a sea of supplements onto her desk in lieu of lunch. She was on a cleanse but allowed herself champagne at night.
The ’90s heroin-chic waif had just been revived in Hedi Slimane’s size-0 look for Dior Homme – cigarette pants to pair with cigarettes. While the public recoiled at Kate Moss’s “nothing tastes as good as skinny feels” line, we just thought, bless our Kate. I recall my own sense of accomplishment at jamming myself into the Miu Miu runway samples I had snapped up at the press sale. For this fashion set, thin has always been in.
Today, the industry has found a new ally in Ozempic as a “health” intervention.
My weight is about 12 kilograms above where it was when I was at Vogue. Noting this gain last year, my GP was quick to suggest a seven-year plan of Ozempic, in light of my insulin resistance. She immediately inferred that this weight must be causing me stress, given the industry I work in. Granted, insulin resistance or sensitivity is a legitimate reason to prescribe the drug, but it’s interesting to note the proliferation of pre-diabetic classifications. Dr Tressie McMillan Cottom addressed this in an op-ed for The New York Times: “My doctor assumed I would want to be thin. In many ways, she was providing exactly the service I didn’t realize I was paying for – acculturating me to the expectations of the right body for my station.”
In an about-face from the body inclusivity movement that was emerging five years ago, when the industry seemed finally to be embracing more diverse shapes and sizes, 2024 was the year of the incredible shrinking. We are now witnessing the cultural effect of normalised Ozempic use on our screens, red carpets, runways, their front rows and perhaps even in our circles.
Ozempic, the most commonly known brand of semaglutide, and the wider class of GLP-1 drugs have been hailed as medical breakthroughs in the treatment of diabetes, high blood pressure, heart failure, kidney disease and clinical obesity. New studies claim to have identified other beneficial side effects, such as suppressing addictive behaviours like smoking or gambling. That’s contributed to a heavy uptake of these drugs, prescribed or unprescribed, among people who just want to be as thin as possible, to achieve an unrealistic, “ideal” weight.
This conflation of health with thinness is a disturbing backwards trend.
The “Vogue Business Spring/Summer 2025 Size Inclusivity Report” – a quantitative analysis published every season in the fashion calendar – was grim. It noted a plateau in size diversity on the runway and “alarmingly, a marked increase in the number of models at the extremely thin end of the spectrum”. Just 0.8 per cent of all shows across Paris, New York, Milan and London (8763 looks in total) were plus-size – an Australian size 18 and above. Only 4.3 per cent were mid-size – where most women sit, at an Australian size 10 to 16. Almost 95 per cent of looks on these runways were between the Australian sizes 2 and 8. The report cited the pervasiveness of Ozempic as a contributor to the “glamorisation of thinness”.
It noted that independent labels such as Ester Manas, Sunnei and Chopova Lowena seemed to be propping up the size-diversity agenda, in stark contrast with major luxury houses such as Louis Vuitton and Dior. In other words, the most committed brands were those with the smallest budgets and fewest resources to fund the additional sample sets that are often cited as an economic barrier to size diversity. At time of writing, designers at the pinnacle of high fashion are presenting their Spring 2025 couture collections in Paris. Thus far, the body count for size inclusivity across 298 looks from Chanel, Christian Dior, Armani Privé, Valentino and Schiaparelli is zero.
The responsibility of being the faces and bodies of size inclusivity seems to fall predominantly on women of colour – the overwhelming majority of plus- and mid-size talent is brown or black. While models such as Paloma Elsesser, Jill Kortleve, Devyn Garcia and Precious Lee are all exceptional beauties, deserving of their place as modern-day supers, I question how the diversity they represent is utilised. More often than not, plus- or mid-size models are relegated to flesh-baring looks that seem to call attention to bodies rather than the fashion they wear, further fetishising and othering those who are anything but the skinny white norm. I can’t help reflecting on how compelling it would have been to style these models in shows and looks that project both polish and ease, such as The Row and Bottega Veneta, or the languid suits of Saint Laurent.
“Trend” is a good way to describe the relationship between body positivity and fashion. Rather than a movement, it has been more of a moment. Substantive and meaningful change requires those setting the agendas to believe it themselves. The Vogue report puts the blame and onus largely on designers, but I’ve never met an editor who didn’t equate thinness with chic. Jo Ellison, editor of the Financial Times’s luxury magazine, HTSI, observed following the SS25 shows that while the proliferation of Ozempic in an industry that venerates thinness is no surprise, she was stunned by some of her colleagues’ transformations.
Size diversity tends to be a macro discussion point in editorial meetings, but the reality of shooting a celebrity or “real person” elicits sighs of disappointment around fashion offices about how the clothes they’ll be able to wear “won’t look as good”. While many editors have a genuine desire to reshape the industry towards healthier and more inclusive portrayals of fashion, making real change is tricky when the very same people are themselves enslaved to the cult of thin.
That conflict was laid bare a few seasons ago in a global Vogue planning meeting I attended at the Bristol in Paris. Greeting a colleague, I was met with a defeated hello that became a lament about how “fat” they felt. Yet that same meeting reached a clear consensus on the backsteps in size diversity in the casting of the shows we’d just seen.
Despite my indoctrination into the cult of thin, I sought a second opinion and changed GPs. I felt uneasy staring down seven years of injecting myself. More to the point, on the whole, I feel the healthiest I’ve ever been – mind, body and soul. At my Vogue weight, I ran on coffee, junk food and three hours of sleep a night if I was lucky. Making my weight the focus, as a size 10 to 12 with a healthy BMI, felt off to me. I thought I might try going for a run.
But it seems as if every second person I know in Sydney is on some iteration of Ozempic. When I ask my friends about their experiences with the drug, a common thread is relief from “food noise” (that’s aside from perpetual nausea and a reaction to alcohol that prompts a can-I-die-from-a-hangover Google search). One tells me about the rental space freed up by not thinking about food: “You know the feeling at 3pm when you want a little treat – that’s gone!” This freedom is widely reported as one of the miracles of Ozempic. But at what point does food noise actually mean hunger? Is this the new luxury: to be liberated from something fundamental to being human?
Eventually that friend stopped taking Ozempic. As an avid cook and lover of food, he missed his hunger and the joy of eating. Some things do taste as good as skinny feels.
This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on February 8, 2025 as "The new cult of thin".
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