Fashion's Ozempic Reckoning

**Sheena Butler-Young** (0:10)
We are live from The Business of Fashion, where each week we delve into our most popular BoF professional stories with the correspondents who created them. I'm Senior Correspondent Sheena Butler-Young.
Picture a person standing in front of their own wardrobe, staring at a row of clothes they bought six months ago. None of them fit anymore, not because they've gained weight, but because they've lost it, fast, with the help of a GLP-1 drug like Ozempic. Our person here is not just looking for a smaller size, they're looking for something that actually fits the body that they have now, which is different from the body that they had last month, and may be different again next month.
One in eight Americans has now used a GLP-1 drug, and they're exposing a weakness in fashion sizing system. It was built around the assumption that consumers bodies would remain relatively stable over time. Yes, people have always gained and lost weight, but GLP-1s are making bodies change faster, more frequently, and more visibly than ever before. The question isn't just how to make smaller clothes, it's how to redesign the entire infrastructure of how clothes get made, planned, and sold. Joining me today to discuss is BoF Senior News and Features Editor, Diana Pearl, and Business of Beauty News and Features Editor, Brennan Kilbane. Diana, Brennan, welcome to The Debrief.

**Diana Pearl** (1:30)
Thanks so much for having me.

**Brennan Kilbane** (1:32)
Thanks, Sheena. Good to see you.

**Sheena Butler-Young** (1:35)
So this episode is actually based on my recent story, which is how Ozempic is forcing fashion to rethink fit. I want to start with a comment section on Instagram when we posted that story, because I think it surfaces the genuine tension here. So the most liked comment, which had 463 likes said, so plus size women have been saying for decades that traditional fashion sizing needs to be rethought. But the rise of Ozempic is what's actually making fashion change very telling.
So what I hear in that comment is a certain kind of scepticism about why the industry is paying attention now.
Brennan, I want to start with you. You've covered GLP-1s extensively, and one of your stories called them the most consequential medical development since penicillin. That is a huge statement. So I want to start with why you think these drugs have become such a cultural flashpoint.

**Brennan Kilbane** (2:22)
Well, thank you so much, Sheena.
I was perhaps being a little bit hyperbolic when I said it is the most consequential development since penicillin, but GLP-1 drugs are a huge shift. And to kind of understand the shift, you really have to look back at decades of attempts to make a pharmaceutical product that can help consumers safely shed weight. Right. So, you know, you have in like the 1930s, 40s and 50s, people experimenting with essentially amphetamines that helped them curb their appetites and eat less.
And that led to a wave of developments in the later half of the 20th century, where products were coming to market that helped people curb their appetites, but were not safe. You know, the best example is phentermine. When phentermine was combined with another drug to make Phen-Phen in the 90s and was a big cultural moment because it seemed to be very, very effective, but then almost immediately was recalled and kind of became the small public health crisis because of its effects on the cardiovascular system. So there's been this demand for a long time, especially in the US, which deals with obesity more than any other country in the developed world. And at the same time, you saw these diabetes drugs that were being produced in the 2000s and 2010s that were showing weight loss, safe weight loss as a promising side effect. So this GLP-1 boom that we're seeing now, I guess, in 2026 is really the result of those drugs, which had just started to be approved at the end of the 2010s and early 2020s for weight loss specifically, you know, your Wegovy's, Ozempics. And now the drugs are rapidly iterating. So this does seem to be a shift in medicine and in weight loss medicine, unlike any we've ever seen before.

**Sheena Butler-Young** (4:09)
It was so interesting when you were speaking, Brennan, because I was getting flashbacks to the 90s and the early 2000s and the supermarket checkout line and women's worlds. And probably every month, I saw Marie Osmond on the cover down 20 pounds, 30 pounds with a measuring tape around her waist and touting a new invention, a new drug and always sort of scratching my head a little bit, like, is this one the latest and greatest or is it going to be something else next month? But Diana, why do you think, similar to what Brennan has just, he's sort of given us the chronology here, but why do you think these drugs are provoking such a different reaction than previous conversations? Is it that they're so effective after years of some effective drugs with many different side effects? Or is it also because in fashion, I think the consumer has long questioned the credibility of body positivity and we're at a cultural flashpoint there, or probably both of those things?