New York
Buying garments has all the time been difficult for Ann Lindsay.
As a plus-sized 41-year-old, she finds many shops’ plus-size choices too matronly or too costly.
Lately, it’s gotten worse: Last month, she observed that her native Target in Chicago eliminated plus sizes solely. There have been considerably fewer choices on-line, too.
In the pre-Covid period, large field retailers pushed inclusive sizing with fanfare. (“Whatever the tag says, you’re always a size YES to us,” Old Navy proclaimed in a large marketing campaign in 2018.)
But now plus-size buyers say inclusive sizing is dwindling, because the rise of GLP-1s fuels worries a couple of return of thin tradition – a vogue and tradition resurgence in thinness.
“I see the direction of skinny culture,” Lindsay stated. “Brands are just falling right in line with what they think people want.”
Plus-size clothes within the United States typically begins at measurement 14 or 16 for girls.
Extended sizes for girls’s attire on Target’s web site fell 37% from March 2025 to March 2026, with a 30% downturn in simply the previous six months, in accordance to information from retail intelligence agency EDITED. Similarly, at Old Navy, plus-size choices fell by 12% this yr in contrast to the identical interval final yr, EDITED discovered.
Target stated it adjusts choices to meet client demand. Old Navy didn’t reply to NCS’s request for remark.
“There is no question that GLP-1s are changing or having profound impacts across retail,” Simeon Siegel, a senior managing director at asset supervisor and advisory agency Guggenheim Partners, informed NCS. While these adjustments are nonetheless underway, that might have an effect on every part from clothes to train choices, he added.
But plus-size buyers who spoke to NCS stated they want to shop now, not wait for clothes traits to shake out within the subsequent decade.
“Retailers are essentially saying that they’d rather wait for us to get smaller than serve us now,” Colleen Marie, a 26-year-old from New York who’s tried a GLP-1 up to now, stated.
For plus-size buyers, inclusivity has retreated quickly in the previous couple of years.
It was already troublesome to discover plus-size clothes, even earlier than GLP-1s took over the nationwide consciousness. The decline of plus sizes in shops has been ongoing, Saunders stated.
“If plus sizes don’t sell well or sell very slowly at stores, retailers don’t want to carry them,” he stated. That can create a vicious cycle: Plus sizes don’t promote, so retailers inventory them much less, which attracts fewer prospects, which implies the sizes promote much less.
Customers who spoke to NCS stated plus sizes have been already usually behind the shop or have been on straight-size fashions.
Marie, the New Yorker, has traditionally solely shopped for jewellery and equipment throughout mall journeys along with her pals.
Plus-size buyers make up a good portion of shoppers. The common waist measurement for girls within the US is 38.5 inches — roughly a measurement 16 — in accordance to data from the CDC. The male equal of plus-size is usually known as “big and tall.”
Shannon Clemens co-opened The Plus Closet, a Nasvhille thrift retailer specializing in larger sizes, in 2023. She hasn’t seen a drop in prospects within the Ozempic age, although she does see individuals dropping off garments who say they’re in the course of GLP-1 therapy.
But she doesn’t anticipate her enterprise to change a lot. “There’s always going to be people gaining and losing weight, because that is just how bodies work,” Clemens informed NCS.
Many main clothes manufacturers have backtracked from their inclusivity messages within the late 2010s.
Old Navy, for instance, dedicated to put its Plus assortment into 75 bodily shops in 2018, branding it measurement “YES!” But in 2022, it said it had not seen the “expected demand for extended size products” and reduce in shops (although it nonetheless presents a full assortment on-line). Loft additionally pulled many of its plus sizes from shops in 2021.
Even shops that attracted essentially the most plus-sized prospects struggled to serve their wants, which then precipitated the shops to pull again in “a self-fulfilling prophecy,” Mallorie Dunn, a researcher and visiting assistant professor at Pratt’s Institute’s vogue design division, informed NCS.
Dunn surveyed 300 individuals with a waistline of 34 inches and up. She discovered that Old Navy and Target have been among the many two hottest shops for respondents.
Plus-sized fashionistas informed NCS that their demographic was handled by the style world as a token at greatest. Now they really feel completely sidelined.
“(GLP-1s are) just an excuse for retailers to continue to push fat people out of the space and just restrict options and continue to mass produce certain sizes of clothing,” Kimmy Garris, a plus-size vogue influencer in Nashville, Tennessee, informed NCS.
GLP-1s didn’t spark the discount in plus sizes. Saunders, the retail analyst, informed NCS that the decline has been an ongoing downside and that it’s largely linked to demand: “It’s inefficient to stock inventory that doesn’t move quickly.”
Additionally, inclusive sizing can complicate manufacturing and enhance prices for retailers, which have been slammed by tariffs over the previous yr.
But the affect of medicine like Ozempic, Wegovy and Zepbound has crept in. Clothing firm DXL, which sells males’s large and tall attire, estimated that up to 25% of its prospects are on weight-loss medicine in its March earnings name. JP Morgan estimated round 10 million Americans have been on GLP-1 remedies in 2025.
DXL stated shoppers on GLP-1s aren’t shopping for garments till they attain their objective weights. But like the remainder of the retail business, its prospects are additionally extra hesitant to spend due to financial pressures. Retailers are having a tough time separating out precisely what’s inflicting client adjustments.
“We have done primary research, we have bought secondary research, and we have consumer research,” and none of it reveals a excessive correlation, DXL CEO Harvey Kanter stated within the earnings name. “Anecdotally, we did not think (GLP-1s would) be impacting the business as much as we think it is today.”