Where Did All the Curvy Models Go?

April 18, 2026

Walk through the halls of London Fashion Week in February and you feel it before you see it. There's a particular kind of silence that settles when a room is missing something essential. The models this season move with the same grace as always, their posture just as deliberate, their presence just as commanding. But there's a narrowness to the silhouettes that passes down the runway now, a uniformity that wasn't there just a season before.

In September 2024, eighty curvy models walked London Fashion Week. In February 2025, that number dropped to twenty-six. The same decline was unfolding elsewhere. New York's count fell from seventy models to twenty-three. Across the four major fashion weeks, plus-size representation has withered to something barely visible on paper: just 0.3% of all looks. Milan, in its entirety, featured zero.

These are not soft numbers. These are not open to interpretation. They represent a seismic shift in how the fashion industry is thinking about bodies, and the shift is happening at stunning speed.

When the Fashion Industry Looked the Other Way

Numbers alone can feel abstract. Until you realize what they mean. For Spring/Summer 2026, across 9,038 total runway looks at the major fashion weeks, 97.1% of those looks were designed for straight-size bodies. US 0 through 4. The percentages for plus-size representation didn't climb above one percent. When researchers from Business of Fashion and Vogue Business began documenting the trend, the findings were consistent enough to be unmistakable: the industry had quietly, methodically begun to narrow itself again.

What's remarkable about this contraction is not just its scale but its speed. Fashion has a long and complicated history with body diversity, but the past few years had seemed to signal something different. There had been pushback, conversations, a growing number of brands pledging to broaden their range. Then, somewhere between late 2024 and early 2025, the momentum stopped. It didn't slow. It stopped.

"Curve model casting had all but frozen over," according to designer Karoline Vitto, who found herself asking a question nobody else seemed willing to voice out loud: Where did all the curvy models go?

The Question Nobody Asked

Vitto opened her Fall 2026 show notes at London Fashion Week with exactly that phrase. Not as a flourish, not as a rhetorical device designed for social media commentary, but as a genuine expression of bewilderment. She had just emerged from two years away from the catwalk. When she stepped back in, the landscape had shifted so dramatically that she felt compelled to name it before the first model even walked.

What happened next was, in its own way, radical. Instead of accepting the new normal, Vitto made a decision that seems obvious and yet, given the industry's current trajectory, felt almost defiant. She cast her show with size-diverse models. Twenty-three of them, moving across the runway in body-conscious silhouettes that required real physical presence, real confidence, real ownership of space.

Some of those models paid their own flights from Brazil and the United States to be there. That detail matters. It speaks to something fundamental about what's happening beneath the surface: the weight of maintaining body diversity is being placed on a handful of individual designers, on a handful of individual models. It's become a burden rather than a standard.

Elegance Does Not Have a Size

For Marwa, the founder of Faza Atelier, this moment crystallizes something she's been thinking about for years. "The fashion industry has always struggled with this," Marwa explains. "It moves forward and backward, sometimes in the same season. But what strikes me now is how deliberate the backward movement feels. It's not happening by accident."

Faza was built on a different principle entirely. Not as a rebellion, exactly, but as an alternative philosophy: that elegance exists across sizes, that a woman in a size 3XL deserves the same precision tailoring as someone in a size S. That construction matters. That proportion matters. That these things don't become irrelevant simply because the body wearing the garment is larger.

This is why Faza's approach to sizing and cut extends across European sizes S through 3XL, and why each size is drafted individually rather than graded algorithmically. The Aurora Blazer, for instance, is not the same pattern enlarged. It's reimagined. The shoulder seam sits differently. The dart placement changes. The button placement shifts. A woman in a larger size experiences the same intentionality, the same architectural precision, as the original sketches intended.

As Marwa puts it: "If you design for size diversity from the beginning, you're designing better clothes. Full stop. You have to think more carefully about what you're actually doing. You can't hide behind the assumption that there's only one way for something to sit on a body."

What the Numbers Mean

The contraction in plus-size runway representation matters for reasons that go beyond representation itself, though representation matters. It matters because it signals what the industry considers acceptable to design for. When a size is absent from the runway, it becomes easier, psychologically, to tell yourself it's not essential to the collection. That it's a separate line. That it's something added on, not integrated from the beginning.

Once you start designing that way, the gap widens. The product that reaches customers in larger sizes becomes derivative, becomes compromised, becomes something different from the original vision. And once that gap exists in the industry's mind, it becomes easy to ask whether those sizes are worth including at all.

This is not how Faza operates. The Aurora Trousers, which have become quietly essential in the Faza collection, were designed simultaneously across all sizes. The rise, the inseam, the silhouette through the hip and thigh, all drafted with the same intention for a woman wearing a size M as for a woman wearing a size XXL. The price difference across sizes is modest, typically between €160 and €240, depending on fabric and construction. There are no shortcuts. There are no size-up penalties.

Why This Matters Right Now

Karoline Vitto's decision to cast a diverse show at London Fashion Week in February 2026 was not a trend-setting move. It should have been routine. Instead, it felt like an act of resistance, which is its own kind of indictment. When doing the right thing requires deliberate courage, when it requires models to pay their own way, when it registers as noteworthy, you know the industry has failed at something fundamental.

Marwa reflects on the broader challenge. "The weight of body diversity should not rest on a handful of designers," she says. "It shouldn't be something that requires courage to do. It should be the baseline. And the fact that we're not there yet means we haven't really solved anything. We've just distributed the burden differently."

The gap between what fashion industry leaders say about diversity and what they actually do seems to be widening rather than closing. The public commitments remain. The Pinterest boards still feature diverse imagery. The marketing departments still talk about inclusivity. But in the actual construction of collections, in the casting of shows, in the day-to-day decisions about who gets designed for and who doesn't, the industry is contracting.

Building Something Different

What becomes clear when you look at this data, when you think about what happened at London Fashion Week, is that change at scale requires something more than individual acts of courage. It requires infrastructure. It requires design practices built in from the beginning. It requires pricing structures that don't penalize women for wearing different sizes. It requires companies to make integration the default rather than the exception.

This is foundational to how Faza operates. Every collection, every piece, every silhouette exists across the full size range. Not because of a sizing algorithm, but because each size was considered during the design phase. The fit models across sizes are hired during development. The proportions are tested. The silhouettes are refined.

When you design this way, you don't end up with a size M that's elegant and a size XXL that's practical. You end up with garments that work, genuinely work, across different bodies. The Augusta Dress in the Spring collection came out of exactly this approach. It's body-conscious, meant to be worn close to the skin, which theoretically should be more challenging to execute across sizes. Instead, Marwa and her design team spent additional time understanding how the fabric would drape, how the seaming would function, how the silhouette would feel on different proportions.

The result is a dress that feels intentional at every size. That's the difference between designing for diversity and designing with diversity baked in from the concept stage.

The Silence of a Fashion Week

When you walk through Fashion Week and feel that particular silence, that gap where certain silhouettes used to move, you're not just observing a trend. You're watching an industry make a choice about who it considers its customer, who it considers worth the effort of design, who it considers essential to its vision of beauty.

The fact that Karoline Vitto had to ask "Where did all the curvy models go?" and then answer her own question by casting them anyway, suggests that the industry knows something is wrong. It hasn't forgotten how to include body diversity. It's actively choosing not to. The difference matters.

There's an argument to be made that we're seeing a pendulum swing, that this moment of contraction will eventually give way to another period of expansion, that these cycles are inevitable. But there's another possibility: that without deliberate action, without brands committing to design infrastructure that supports size diversity, the pendulum might not swing back. The narrowing might become the new normal.

That's where places like Faza become important. Not as the exception that proves the rule, but as an alternative model. A company built from the ground up on the principle that elegance exists across sizes, that better design comes from thinking about more bodies, that the future of fashion is going to require taking diversity seriously not as a trend but as a fundamental design practice.

Looking Forward

The question Karoline Vitto asked in her show notes was not rhetorical. It deserves an answer, and that answer will determine what the fashion industry looks like over the next few years. Will it continue to narrow, becoming smaller and more exclusive? Or will it recognize that there's no vision of elegance that requires excluding most people?

Marwa's perspective on this is characteristically grounded. "We can't wait for the industry to decide," she says. "The industry will move when customers demand it, when the economics make sense, when it becomes impossible to ignore. So we build the alternative now. We show what's possible when you design with intention for all bodies. We make clothes that work, that last, that feel good to wear, across sizes. And we make them accessible. Not luxury prices. Not mass-market shortcuts. Thoughtful accessible premium pieces that anyone can afford to invest in."

That's the real alternative to what's happening on the major fashion week runways right now. It's not to shame the industry for contracting, though contraction deserves scrutiny. It's to build something that didn't require a wholesale change in the industry's priorities to exist. Something that treats body diversity not as a trend or a moral imperative or a marketing opportunity, but simply as the starting point for good design.