New York
Buying clothes has always been challenging for Ann Lindsay.
As a plus-sized 41-year-old, she finds many stores’ plus-size offerings too matronly or too expensive.
Lately, it’s gotten worse: Last month, she noticed that her local Target in Chicago removed plus sizes entirely. There were significantly fewer options online, too.
In the pre-Covid era, big box retailers pushed inclusive sizing with fanfare. (“Whatever the tag says, you’re always a size YES to us,” Old Navy proclaimed in a massive campaign in 2018.)
But now plus-size shoppers say inclusive sizing is dwindling, as the rise of GLP-1s fuels worries about a return of skinny culture – a fashion and culture resurgence in thinness.
“I see the direction of skinny culture,” Lindsay said. “Brands are just falling right in line with what they think people want.”
Plus-size clothing in the United States generally starts at size 14 or 16 for women.
Extended sizes for women’s apparel on Target’s website fell 37% from March 2025 to March 2026, with a 30% downturn in just the past six months, according to data from retail intelligence firm EDITED. Similarly, at Old Navy, plus-size options fell by 12% this year compared to the same period last year, EDITED found.
Target said it adjusts offerings to meet consumer demand. Old Navy did not respond to CNN’s request for comment.
“There is no question that GLP-1s are changing or having profound impacts across retail,” Simeon Siegel, a senior managing director at asset manager and advisory firm Guggenheim Partners, told CNN. While those changes are still underway, that could affect everything from clothing to exercise options, he added.
But plus-size shoppers who spoke to CNN said they need to shop now, not wait for clothing trends to shake out in the next 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 in the past, said.
For plus-size shoppers, inclusivity has retreated rapidly in the last few years.
It was already difficult to find plus-size clothing, even before GLP-1s took over the national consciousness. The decline of plus sizes in stores has been ongoing, Saunders said.
“If plus sizes don’t sell well or sell very slowly at stores, retailers don’t want to carry them,” he said. That can create a vicious cycle: Plus sizes don’t sell, so retailers stock them less, which attracts fewer customers, which means the sizes sell less.
Customers who spoke to CNN said plus sizes were already often in the back of the store or were on straight-size models.
Marie, the New Yorker, has historically only shopped for jewelry and accessories during mall trips with her friends.
Plus-size shoppers make up a significant portion of consumers. The average waist size for women in the US is 38.5 inches — roughly a size 16 — according to data from the CDC. The male equivalent of plus-size is typically called “big and tall.”
Shannon Clemens co-opened The Plus Closet, a Nasvhille thrift store specializing in bigger sizes, in 2023. She hasn’t seen a drop in customers in the Ozempic age, though she does see people dropping off clothes who say they are in the middle of GLP-1 treatment.
But she doesn’t expect her business to change much. “There’s always going to be people gaining and losing weight, because that is just how bodies work,” Clemens told CNN.
Many major clothing brands have backtracked from their inclusivity messages in the late 2010s.
Old Navy, for example, committed to put its Plus collection into 75 physical stores in 2018, branding it size “YES!” But in 2022, it said it had not seen the “expected demand for extended size products” and cut back in stores (though it still offers a full collection online). Loft also pulled many of its plus sizes from stores in 2021.
Even stores that attracted the most plus-sized customers struggled to serve their needs, which then caused the stores to pull back in “a self-fulfilling prophecy,” Mallorie Dunn, a researcher and visiting assistant professor at Pratt’s Institute’s fashion design department, told CNN.
Dunn surveyed 300 people with a waistline of 34 inches and up. She found that Old Navy and Target were among the two most popular stores for respondents.
Plus-sized fashionistas told CNN that their demographic was treated by the fashion world as a token at best. Now they feel totally 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 fashion influencer in Nashville, Tennessee, told CNN.
GLP-1s didn’t spark the reduction in plus sizes. Saunders, the retail analyst, told CNN that the decline has been an ongoing problem and that it’s mostly linked to demand: “It’s inefficient to stock inventory that doesn’t move quickly.”
Additionally, inclusive sizing can complicate manufacturing and increase costs for retailers, which have been slammed by tariffs over the past year.
But the influence of drugs like Ozempic, Wegovy and Zepbound has crept in. Clothing company DXL, which sells men’s big and tall apparel, estimated that up to 25% of its customers are on weight-loss drugs in its March earnings call. JP Morgan estimated around 10 million Americans were on GLP-1 treatments in 2025.
DXL said consumers on GLP-1s aren’t buying clothes until they reach their goal weights. But like the rest of the retail industry, its customers are also more hesitant to spend because of economic pressures. Retailers are having a hard time separating out exactly what’s causing consumer changes.
“We have done primary research, we have bought secondary research, and we have consumer research,” and none of it shows a high correlation, DXL CEO Harvey Kanter said in the earnings call. “Anecdotally, we did not think (GLP-1s would) be impacting the business as much as we think it is today.”