By Ramishah Maruf, NCS
New York (NCS) — Buying garments has at all times been difficult for Ann Lindsay.
As a plus-sized 41-yr-outdated, she finds many shops’ plus-dimension choices too matronly or too costly.
Lately, it’s gotten worse: Last month, she seen that her native Target in Chicago eliminated plus sizes solely. There have been considerably fewer choices on-line, too.
In the pre-Covid period, huge field retailers pushed inclusive sizing with fanfare. (“Whatever the tag says, you’re always a size YES to us,” Old Navy proclaimed in an enormous marketing campaign in 2018.)
But now plus-dimension consumers say inclusive sizing is dwindling, because the rise of GLP-1s fuels worries a few return of thin tradition – a trend and tradition resurgence in thinness.
“I see the direction of skinny culture,” Lindsay mentioned. “Brands are just falling right in line with what they think people want.”
Plus-size clothes within the United States usually begins at dimension 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 knowledge from retail intelligence agency EDITED. Similarly, at Old Navy, plus-dimension choices fell by 12% this yr in contrast to the identical interval final yr, EDITED discovered.
Target mentioned it adjusts choices to meet shopper 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 modifications are nonetheless underway, that would have an effect on every part from clothes to train choices, he added.
But plus-dimension consumers who spoke to NCS mentioned they want to shop now, not wait for clothes developments 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are essentially saying that they’d rather wait for us to get smaller than serve us now,” Colleen Marie, a 26-yr-outdated from New York who’s tried a GLP-1 previously, mentioned.
Leaving out a significant shopper
For plus-dimension consumers, inclusivity has retreated quickly in the previous few years.
It was already troublesome to discover plus-dimension clothes, even earlier than GLP-1s took over the nationwide consciousness. The decline of plus sizes in shops has been ongoing, Saunders mentioned.
“If plus sizes don’t sell well or sell very slowly at stores, retailers don’t want to carry them,” he mentioned. That can create a vicious cycle: Plus sizes don’t promote, so retailers inventory them much less, which attracts fewer clients, which suggests the sizes promote much less.
Customers who spoke to NCS mentioned plus sizes have been already usually at the back of the shop or have been on straight-dimension fashions.
Marie, the New Yorker, has traditionally solely shopped for jewellery and equipment throughout mall journeys together with her associates.
Plus-size consumers make up a good portion of shoppers. The common waist dimension for girls within the US is 38.5 inches — roughly a dimension 16 — in accordance to data from the CDC. The male equal of plus-dimension is usually known as “big and tall.”
Shannon Clemens co-opened The Plus Closet, a Nasvhille thrift retailer specializing in greater sizes, in 2023. She hasn’t seen a drop in clients 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 dimension “YES!” But in 2022, it said it had not seen the “expected demand for extended size products” and reduce in shops (although it nonetheless provides 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 clients struggled to serve their wants, which then brought on the shops to pull again in “a self-fulfilling prophecy,” Mallorie Dunn, a researcher and visiting assistant professor at Pratt’s Institute’s trend 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 finest. 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-dimension trend influencer in Nashville, Tennessee, informed NCS.
Creeping affect
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 improve prices for retailers, which have been slammed by tariffs over the previous yr.
But the affect of medication like Ozempic, Wegovy and Zepbound has crept in. Clothing firm DXL, which sells males’s huge and tall attire, estimated that up to 25% of its clients are on weight-loss medication in its March earnings name. JP Morgan estimated round 10 million Americans have been on GLP-1 therapies in 2025.
DXL mentioned shoppers on GLP-1s aren’t shopping for garments till they attain their purpose weights. But like the remainder of the retail trade, its clients are additionally extra hesitant to spend due to financial pressures. Retailers are having a tough time separating out precisely what’s inflicting shopper modifications.
“We have done primary research, we have bought secondary research, and we have consumer research,” and none of it exhibits a excessive correlation, DXL CEO Harvey Kanter mentioned within the earnings name. “Anecdotally, we did not think (GLP-1s would) be impacting the business as much as we think it is today.”
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