At the peak of fashion's body positivity era, London Fashion Week had 80 curvy models on the runway in a single season. New York had 70. Milan, 14. By early 2026, London was down to 26. New York to 23. The shift happened fast, and it happened quietly.

No announcements. No brand statements. Just a runway that kept getting thinner, season by season, as weight-loss medication reshaped who the industry decided to dress.

What the data shows

At spring/summer 2025, plus-size models made up just 0.8% of all runway appearances across the four major fashion weeks. At the spring/summer 2020 peak, that figure had reached 2.8% — 86 models across New York, London, Milan, and Paris. In five seasons, the industry gave back nearly everything it had gained in a decade.

Major labels including Valentino, Balenciaga, and Gucci, which had added plus and mid-size models to their shows, returned to 100% straight-sized casting. Agencies that manage curve models report 40% fewer casting calls at major shows. Models who had built steady careers on the back of the body positivity wave have watched their bookings collapse.

What drove it

The direct trigger is GLP-1 weight-loss medications — Ozempic and its equivalents — which reached cultural saturation in 2023 and 2024. Fashion, which reads cultural signals faster than almost any other industry, followed. Thinner bodies were trending in celebrity culture, in wellness conversation, on social media. The runway followed the moment, not the women.

What became clear is that the industry's commitment to body diversity was never structural. It was responsive — a market adjustment to a cultural wave. When the wave changed direction, the casting changed with it.

Why this matters for how you shop

If a brand's size range tracks the cultural moment rather than the actual bodies of its customers, the range will keep moving. Expanded sizes appear when they're commercially useful. They quietly contract when something else is trending.

This is not theoretical. It is the documented pattern of the last five years.

The alternative is a brand whose range was built into its structure from day one — not added in response to demand, not expandable or contractable depending on the season. Faza Atelier has run S to XXL since its first collection. Not as a response to the body positivity era. As the only architecture that made sense when the brand was built.

What to take from this

The industry's body positivity era was real in its cultural effect — it changed what women expected to see. But it was conditional in its commercial form. When conditions changed, the runway changed with it.

Knowing this changes how you read a brand. An inclusive campaign is not a commitment. A permanent, structurally embedded size range is.

Frequently asked questions

Why did runway diversity decline so fast after 2023?

The primary driver was the mainstream adoption of GLP-1 weight-loss medications (Ozempic, Wegovy), which shifted the body ideals that influence casting. Fashion's body positivity era was largely a market response to cultural demand rather than a structural shift — when that cultural signal changed, casting followed.

Are any fashion weeks still showing curvy representation?

Some individual designers continue to cast across body types, and several emerging brands were specifically founded around extended-size fit. But the major show averages are at historic lows, with plus-size models representing less than 1% of runway appearances in 2025.

What's the difference between a brand that truly caters to curvy women and one that just markets to them?

A brand built for curvy women creates separate pattern blocks for each size, invests in fit at every size point, and doesn't offer an "extended" range as a separate capsule. If the curvy range is a small secondary collection that could be discontinued without changing the core business, it's marketing. If the size range is the architecture of the brand, it's something else.

Sources: The Mother Agents — How Ozempic Is Reshaping Fashion's Body Standards · Fashion Journal — What it's really like to be a curve model in the age of Ozempic · Refinery29 — NYFW Has A Size Diversity Problem