“My body has gone out of style”: A critical examination of fashion magazines’ GLP-1 agonist drug discourse

Introduction

On June 4, 2021, the United States Food and Drug Administration posted a news release announcing that they had approved a GLP-1 agonist (henceforth, GLP-1s), Wegovy, for chronic weight management (U.S. Food and Drug Administration, 2021). The FDA’s announcement paved the way for the health and wellness industry to appropriate GLP-1s – originally developed to treat diabetes – as weight loss aids. Despite Wegovy’s first-mover benefit, Ozempic became the “Band-Aid” of its drug class (Tolentino, 2023), and journalists across beats began writing about the “Ozempic Era.” In March 2025, Elle magazine’s digital space introduced a special landing page titled “Hot Shots,” where they planned to aggregate their reporting on how GLP-1s are “[transforming] the way we think about our bodies, weight loss, and wellness” (Elle, 2025). The time and space between June 2021 and June 2025 had become saturated with coverage of this “miracle drug” that seemingly banishes fat ¹ from human bodies. As Elle’s “Hot Shots” indicates, the fashion and beauty press took a particular interest in this medical innovation, adding another chapter to the complicated history of the social construction of the body through fashion practice, process, and discourse.

This paper offers a critical discourse analysis of the American editions of two leading fashion magazines’ coverage of GLP-1s’ rise as a weight management tool and its potential impact on the fashion industry since June 2021. Even with the dominance of influencers in shaping fashion trends via the various social media channels in the average reader’s media environment, the “glossies” remain vital institutions in fashion media ecology (Torregrosa and Sadaba, 2023). This analysis also illustrates the ways in which the boundaries between lifestyle journalism/media and health/medical journalism are becoming increasingly permeable.

The central question under examination is how have these magazines covered the rise of GLP-1s and what does that coverage reveal about the industry’s ideologies on the human body? How is the discourse of medicine, health, and wellness incorporated into narratives on fashion and body esthetics, thus partially constituting what the body means and is for in the contemporary era? Whose voices and perspectives are included in these narratives? How do those whose bodies have long been marginalized in both fashion and medical spaces, “speak back” to the fetishization of the thin esthetic, now seemingly achievable by any body through medical intervention?

This analysis explores the blending of two journalistic fields that are held in very different levels of esteem in terms of their social contributions and commitment to ethical principles – medicine/science and lifestyle/fashion. Considering the rise of health/wellness “influencers” including medical professionals’ with social media audiences (O’Neill, 2025); threats posed by health and wellness dis/misinformation documented by many scholars (Cacciatore, 2021); as well as the complicated language and systems of power at play in medical and health research and reporting (Briggs and Hallin, 2024), the importance of clear and effective health reporting has never been more important – and never more scrutinized when it falls short. Health and medical journalists have even been called upon to meet and exceed the baseline SPJ code of ethics by the Association of Healthcare Journalists (Association of Health Care Journalists, 2025).

Lifestyle journalism on the other hand and fashion journalism, in particular, has historically been less concerned with and held less accountable to ethical principles (Jones and Jones, 2024). The potential harms of unethical lifestyle journalism, though no less pernicious than the potential harms of unethical health journalism, are also more abstract and diffuse. The fashion editor that lauds a designer’s latest runway presentation may be both living up to the expectations of their role and validating the industry’s many harmful practices like exclusionary model casting or overproduction. But how does health and wellness editorial content in the context of a fashion magazine complicate, reform, and reframe the relationship of fashion (journalism) to social constructions of the body? This paper does not offer guidance on how fashion journalists should cover issues related to health, wellness, and the body. It does, however, nuance fashion journalists’ role as drivers of market consumerism. It provides an opportunity to reflect on how fashion media’s relationship to and with the socially constructed body may foster more personal and impactful conversations on health and wellbeing with their readership.

Fashioned bodies

Dress, fashion, clothing, and apparel are used interchangeably in both lay and academic circles. For clarity, dress is the preferred sociological term to “neutrally” describe what all humans have done to and put on their bodies across time and space. Fashion, on the other hand, is a subcategory of dress which describes a dress object or practice that is adopted by humans for a limited period of time (Welters and Lillethun, 2017); fashion is thus an attribute ascribed to and eventually removed from dress objects or practices – often through mediated discourse. Fashion’s nature is ephemeral and exclusive; dress is universal. Everybody dresses; some bodies participate in fashion. Fashion media discourses on GLP-1s put to the test definitions of dress employed by scholars which includes all modifications to, and supplements worn by, the body (Roach-Higgins and Eicher, 1992: 1).

Roach-Higgins and Eicher (1992), who first introduced this linguistic segregation between fashion and dress, never delineated how and where the dressed body ends and the medical or biological body begins. They acknowledged that their definition imposes a “somewhat arbitrary conceptual separation between biologically determined body characteristics and dress” (1992: p. 1) but contended that the biological body and the dressed body are inextricable. The authors included body modifications as mundane as teeth brushing and as interventionist as Rhinoplasty in their taxonomy of dress practice, both equally entangled in tangent discourses on body/health.

Many explorations of the fashion/body intersection have focused on the material connection of cloth and human form, emphasizing the embodiment and lived experience of being and becoming a dressed body (Eckersley and Duff, 2020). As Eckersley and Duff (2020) note, the academic fields of fashion studies and body studies operate in parallel universes, though lived experience intertwines them. Few scholars in fashion studies have explored the corporeal body sans clothing as a fashion-ed form. Body esthetics are as subject to the shifting whims of collective selection (Blumer, 1969) as clothing, accessories, and beauty applications, wherein particular body shapes, tones, suppleness, etc. are deemed “of the moment.” Joanne Entwistle’s seminal work, Fashioned Bodies (2015), stated that “bodies which do not conform, bodies which flout the conventions of their culture and go without the appropriate clothes are subversive of the most basic social codes and risk exclusion, scorn or ridicule” (Entwistle, 2015: 7). When expanding the definition of dress to include modifications to the physical form of the body, not just what is put on or wrapped around it, the implications for the body as a site for social control and expectations for body conformity expand as well. Entwistle’s observation then takes on additional significance here, since the exclusion, scorn and ridicule experienced when clothing the body inappropriately would thus also be applied to “inappropriate” bodies. If reshaping the body to fit an esthetic ideal is part and parcel of dressing the body more broadly – just as dressing it in the latest silhouette is – then a logical outcome would be the type of fatphobia and body shaming pervasive in American culture. To not have an ideal form – or at the very least, to not be seen working toward it in some way or to not be appropriately chagrinned that one has yet to achieve it – can thus be interpreted as a personal moral failure or a failure of will. Entwistle discussed the discomfort one can feel when attending a social event while improperly dressed (Entwistle, 2015: 7); similarly, living in a body that does not conform to fashion’s esthetic ideals is to be in a body that is always deemed “improper.”

After millennia of human history where fecundity and fatness permeated Western esthetic ideals, fat bodies became an object of derision in the late-19th and early- 20th century press (Fraser, 2009). Incidentally, this coincided with a significant expansion of the ready-to-wear clothing industry, when more women began purchasing mass produced items rather than making them at home or visiting local dressmakers (Silla, 2020). Though Cosmopolitan published a prominent medical professor’s entreaty for women to ignore the demonization of “adipose” on the body in the 1890s (Fraser, 2009: 11), by the 1910s, “stout women” were being instructed on how to use clothing to “deceive the eye with lines that created slenderness” (Keist, 2017: 102). Fat women had more options available beyond home-sewing and custom tailoring thanks to specialist retailers like Lane Bryant, established in 1900 (Keist, 2017). However, Keist also documented an article published by The New York Times in 1911 that framed the burden of designing for fat bodies as one that a dressmaker would be “relieved to be free of,” taxing as it was on her art (2017: p. 100). The underlying logic here can be understood through a Foucauldian view on the relationship between the body and hegemonic power, summarized by Entwistle (2015): “Discipline, rather than being imposed on the ‘fleshy’ body through torture and physical punishment, operates through the establishment of the ‘mindful’ body which calls upon individuals to monitor their own behavior” (pp. 17–18). As Keist’s work established, fat women since at least the turn of the 20th century have been made responsible for controlling their bodies in a way that makes the fashion industry willing to dress them. My own analysis builds on the work of Keist (2017), Peters (2017, 2019), and Volonté (2022) by adding this new chapter on the “Ozempic Era” and the ways in which it is reframing the relationship between fashion, bodies, and health.

Though abstracted through discussion of esthetics and body shape, at the heart of the conversation of dressing the fat body is consumption. Bordo argued that a society that simultaneously encourages consumption but castigates those without self-control “produces an unstable bulimic personality-type as its norm” (1993: p. 187). Bauman (2007) expounded on the centrality of consumption to the construction of identity in contemporary society, what he termed “liquid modernity.” Bauman contrasted the consumerism of liquid modernity with the producer mentality of “solid modernity.” The body was one space through which this ideological shift could be observed. In solid modernity, Bauman argued, the body was a means to an end. In liquid modernity, “the consumer’s/consuming body is ‘autotelic’, its own purpose and a value in its own right; in the society of consumers, it also happens to be the ultimate value” (2005: p. 91). For Bauman, the check on the body’s endless need to consume in liquid modernity was the need to discipline it through “fitness” – whether that means healthy, fashionable, or desirable. What GLP-1s allow, I maintain, is a reconciliation between the consuming body and the slenderness ideal. Consuming the drug is the pathway to the slender ideal, upholding both values simultaneously.

Bordo argued that “preoccupation [with slenderness] may function as one of the most powerful normalizing mechanisms of our century, ensuring the production of self-monitoring and self-disciplining ‘docile bodies’ sensitive to any departure from social norms and habituated to self-improvement and self-transformation in the service of those norms” (1995: p. 186). This state of constant anxiety about the body is also the source of the marketplace’s endless resource to drive consumption. Bordo also argued that “female hunger (as code for female desire) is especially problematized during periods of disruption and change in established gender-relations and in the position of women” (1995: p. 206). Further, it is in times of gender upheaval that the “female body becomes more sylphlike – unlike the body of a fully developed woman, more like that of an adolescent or boy” (Bordo, 1995: 206). In the wake of the Me-Too movement and the backlash to gender queer acceptance (Brechenmacher, 2025), how might GLP-1s fit into these observations? But Bordo also allows women agency in this move toward thinness, arguing that within the rejection of voluptuousness, women may reject the narrow confines within which their bodies have been placed – as predominately concerned with procreation. By including the voices of fat women speaking on the rise of the “Ozempic Era” through the lens of their own lived experience as published in American Vogue and Elle, I seek to avoid reducing the discourse down to the simple narrative that hegemonic ideals of thinness espoused by the press act on bodies in the world without counter-narratives holding them accountable.

To bring the discourse back to embodiment, it is also important to remember that “our bodies are not simply inert objects existing independently of our minds: they are rather the very means through which we come to know the world and articulate our sense of self” (Negrin, 2016: 115). In postmodernity, the body is seen as highly plastic, moldable into any desirable shape (Bordo, 1993). But, enlightened by Bauman’s perspective on the role of the individual in making themselves “fit” for society, it also presumes that the body you want is the body that has been idealized through socialization and mediating forces like fashion magazines. As Young (2005) noted,

“You can have the body you choose, ads and magazine articles suggest [. . .] But these messages do not give us a choice of the variety of real possible bodies. No, the idea that we can have the body we choose is that we can choose to take the body we have [. . .] and make it over into the one and only good body [. . .] There is little choice of what body to value; the normalized body is reinforced by the transformative possibilities of medical technology” (p. 91).

Many of the supporting works I engaged for the purposes of this study were informed by a feminist critique of these narrow pathways toward body acceptance which can result in shame, disembodiment, and feelings of oppression when the ideal cannot be met. However, I also want to ensure the analysis does not overlook any feelings of joy and pleasure in the shaping of one’s body – whether through medication or other forms of body management – expressed in the magazine content collected for this study. The rise of body neutrality, body compassion, and body acceptance movements – all functionally similar in that they emphasize and celebrate the body’s abilities while deemphasizing appearance (Mulgrew and Hinz, 2024) – may also inform the ways in which the press makes sense of the Ozempic era and how it is engaged in lived experience.

Fashioning everyday life in lifestyle journalism

Scholars who critically engage with lifestyle media often start from a defensive position, justifying the importance of the field. As Fürsich (2012) noted, lifestyle journalism, including fashion magazines and the Style sections of newspapers, “has been relegated to the backburner of journalism studies” (p. 12). The genre predominately hails its audience into a consumerist identity (Fiske, 2004; Fürsich, 2012). Since consumerism is often associated with feminine roles in Western society, lifestyle journalism has been viewed as less serious and less vital to democratic world building. I take issue with the dismissiveness even scholars within lifestyle media studies sometimes treat the subject, especially fashion media, when they frame the field’s purpose as “giving readers what they want” (Cheng and Tandoc, 2022: 1217) or entertaining their audience (Findlay and Reponen, 2023: 5). Such an understanding does not take seriously that consumerism is inherently entangled with politics. As such, lifestyle/fashion journalism may provide a much-needed space in which public deliberation on social matters that have direct impact on lived experience can play out.

Much of the literature on the fashion press written from within the fashion studies field has framed the role of the fashion journalist, particularly those who work at magazines, as simply drumming up demand and increasing sales (Kawamura, 2018). The perceived cozy relationship between fashion press and fashion industry has been another rationalization for delegitimization. Fashion editors’ industry connections are the source of their power (Hirsch, 1972) as well as the source of skepticism of their journalistic ethics (Jones, 2022). Early fashion media scholars celebrated fashion magazines’ ability to infuse fashion goods with meaning – through practices like fantastical photo shoots and sycophantic coverage of luxury designer creations – as a mechanism to drive consumerism (Jobling, 1999). Whether it is through imagery or text, fashion magazines have historically heightened the reader’s connection to the world portrayed within, including converge of tangent fields like politics, health, and culture.

Kristensen and From (2012) argued the boundaries between journalistic fields were beginning to blur in the 2010s, combining elements of cultural, lifestyle, and consumerist-oriented reporting. However, fashion magazines have always been about more than just reporting on the latest clothes and accessories for the sake of moving product and increasing sales for industry advertisers. The pages of Vogue, Elle, and their ilk have long included tangent fields of music, art, celebrity, literature, film, and architecture/interior design. Further, fashion magazines like Vogue are both products of and discursive sites for the shifting political, social and economic ideologies permeating the context of their construction (David, 2006). Elle, established in post-WWII France and aimed at a younger (albeit, still wealthy) audience, was the first fashion magazine to discuss contraceptives and encouraged political engagement for its readership alongside its promotion of Paris’s haute couture as the country’s post-war economic driver (Best, 2017: 122–126). Vogue’s decision to endorse a presidential candidate for the first time in 2016 (Vogue, 2016) and Elle’s inclusion of “News and Politics” as a subgenre for their editorial content on their homepage illustrates that both of these fashion glossies are entrenched in discourses that reach beyond their readership’s next shopping excursion. The ways in which they report on and present the body – its health, wellness, and esthetics – is likewise infused with and co-constitutes contemporary body ideologies for and with their readership.

Critical approaches to fashion and lifestyle media studies

By exploring this intersection of mediated aestheticized body discourses and medicalized body discourses in fashion journalism, I examine how Vogue and Elle navigate and weave together narratives of health, wellness, fashion, and consumerism. In the tradition of Stuart Hall’s (2013) critical approach to media representation, I examined these media discourses from the understanding of their power to co-constitute society’s shared meaning of the (fashioned) body. Through this process, I seek to reassert the centrality of the body to getting dressed in contemporary society. By focusing exclusively on legacy fashion magazine discourse, I examined the collective role of, historically, the most powerful voices in the industry and their role in the co-constitution of fashion-as-embodiment.

I examined both print (via the American Vogue archive) and the of digital-only articles published by Elle and Vogue on their US-facing sites that reported on the rise of GLP-1s. I also included content that actively discussed issues of body diversity in the fashion industry published after June 4, 2021, the date of the FDA’s Wegovy announcement, through June 4th, 2025. In addition to analyzing standard reporting on the increasing pervasiveness of GLP-1s, first-person narratives published in these outlets gave voice to the embodied reality of being fat and getting dressed in the “Ozempic Era.” I examined the way the 32 articles retained for this study subscribe to a representational approach to the body versus how the body is experienced in a corporeal way (i.e. the articles written from an “I” point of view vs those who examine the body discourse from a distance and as a question of esthetics/health). This study is thus limited in scope to situate the discourse of Ozempic within the particular socio-economic context of the American fashion industry and American body ideals. Explorations of other editions of these magazines (e.g. Indian Vogue or French Elle) is warranted in future studies for cultural comparison.

I used a critical approach to language “. . .which addresses its involvement in the workings of contemporary capitalist societies” (Fairclough, 2013: 1). In this project I am interested in the discursive practices that build connections between material bodies, fashion (as product, concept, and commercial system), and the drug class GLP-1s. In exploring these discourses with the theory and methodological approach of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), I am taking the position that these discourses have material consequences in the everyday life of humans. By examining the magazines’ published text that reports on the rise of the Ozempic Era, I seek to reveal the “ideological work” being done. Fairclough (2015) explained ideological work as, “when ideologies are brought to the discourse not as explicit elements of the text, but as the background assumptions which on the one hand the text producer to ‘textualize’ the world in a particular way” (p. 108). The inclusion of first-person narratives published within this media environment will, if only moderately, address some of the limitations of the Foucauldian influence on CDA; namely, the presumption that all discourse produced in these sanctioned media spaces is in the service of the hegemonic order, negating the agency of individual humans acting within, against, and outside of the power structure. Expanding this exploration to include the phenomenological experiences of humans outside the domain of mass media is warranted, but outside the scope of this project.

There are of course limits to interpreting and translating the discourses of lifestyle media content directly onto bodies. Though the body features heavily in Foucault’s work, it was almost entirely an object upon which power was enacted; the lived experience of being embodied was of little concern (Entwistle, 2015: 26–27; Foucault, 1981; Hook, 2007). As Negrin (2016) noted, “while in our media-saturated environment where the image reigns supreme, there has been a great emphasis on the construction of the body as visual spectacle, this does not capture the way we experience our bodies as physical beings who move in space” (p. 121). This view adds additional motivation to highlight the first-person narratives published in Vogue and Elle about the embodied experience of being fat, getting dressed and/or taking GLP-1s in the Ozempic Era.

Most of the articles collected for this study fell into one of three categories: (a) making sense of the science and health benefits behind GLP-1s for their readers by engaging the practice of service journalism; (b) broader analysis of the cultural shift in body ideals as it directly relates to the fashion industry’s modus; or (c) providing anecdotal first-person experiences of taking the drug and/or being fat in a society that has returned to its obsession with thinness. As is often the case in lifestyle media and service journalism, the first category of editorials predominately hailed its readership as consumers, presuming they needed the information so they could make informed consumption decisions. The editorials classified into the other two categories offered opportunity for the journalists to process in real time how the rise of the Ozempic Era fits into the broader narrative of how the industry sees itself, the bodies it dresses, and the complex relationship between the two.

Consumption patterns: GLP-1s as just another marketplace product

According to both Vogue and Elle, the post-Ozempic economy will be a boon to the beauty industry: from estheticians and plastic surgeons addressing issues like loose skin to “wellness and longevity centers” offering other “biohacking” treatments to further optimize the body. Several articles focused on the newest trends and developments in the marketplace that built on Ozempic’s promise of a better, more fit, and longer-living “you.” These included articles delineating the supposed benefits of NAD+ catalyzer infusions to further enhance metabolism (Dougherty, 2025), treating “crepey” skin during or after GLP-1 use (Berg, 2025), or the need for Renuvion micro-skin-tightening (Hou and Berohn, 2025b) after weight loss.

That the fashion industry and its collaborators in fashion media give salience to the leading economic growth opportunities is neither novel nor surprising; Bauman’s framing of fashion as the perpetuum mobile of economic activity encapsulates the interdependence of the contemporary industry and neoliberalism (Bauman, 2010; Jones, 2023). The intersection of economic and scientific discourses within the general reporting on the rise of the Ozempic Era lends authority to the claims for self-improvement while also reframing the risks of medical intervention on the body as just another consumer choice. The general sense in these articles was that the benefits outnumbered possible side-effects, both esthetic and health, with one endocrinologist who served as a source in one article stating “the risks [of taking GLP-1s] are minimal” and “they outweigh the risks associated with obesity” (Hou and Berohn, 2025a: n.p.) reinforcing the medical and fashion establishments’ long-held belief that nothing is as bad as being fat. The remainder of this paper will focus on those contributions published by Elle and Vogue that centered the specific human experience of dressing and living in a body during the Ozempic Era.

In the thick and thin of it: Living on and with GLP1s

One of the strengths of lifestyle media is its abiding concern with lived experience. Whose lived experience was prioritized in these editorials, however, shifted in notable ways from article to article and depending on the author. For example, Elle’s “Hot Shots” landing page included a narrative of bodies on GLP-1s, but entirely from the perspective of their intimate partners (Krieger, 2025), abstracting and mediating the embodied experience of being on the medication. The author compiling the responses asks “What if you no longer share the same feelings [as your partner] – particularly toward the warm breadbasket at your favorite restaurant? What if your feelings toward food starts to differ?” (Krieger, 2025: n.p.). A full spectrum of experiences was shared by the 11 “husbands, wives, boyfriends, and girlfriends” interviewed – from increased sex drives due to the partner feeling more confident in their body to a loss of adventure and joy as eating became a utilitarian chore. Though the lived experience of the person taking the medication is abstracted, what is foregrounded is the lived experience of those who love them. However, it also provided space for underlying ideologies to be expressed that may have otherwise remained hidden. For example, one husband lamented that, while his wife was happy with losing 35 pounds, he was struggling with the lack of effort it required. He stated, “I still have trouble with the fact that this has required virtually no change in eating or fitness habits on her part” (Krieger, 2025: n.p.).

Similarly, Vogue shared stories of GLP-1 users struggling to fill the prescriptions at the height of the shortage in early 2024 (Anbouba, 2024). The editorial included perspectives from doctors, pharmaceutical representatives and patients, but highlighted the plight of those who were taking the drug for its original purpose – management of diabetes symptoms – but couldn’t get access due to increased demand for weight management. A “longevity and regenerative medicine doctor” downplayed the severity of the shortage noting that “there were no proven side effects” aside from potential weight gain if a patient couldn’t source the drug (n.p.). He also justified the increased demand for GLP-1s since “people want to use these medications to lose weight because it will make them thinner, and in turn, ‘healthier’” (n.p.). The last word is given to Greg, however, who is using the drug for diabetes management, noting that he needs it to “actually [emphasis added] be healthier” (Anbouba, 2024: n.p.). Both this and the previous article highlight the social embeddedness of the human body, that it is not just ours alone – its shape, valuation, and our individual ability to influence either of these is highly dependent on the social structure and political economy in which our body resides.

Though women are the presumed reader of Vogue and Elle content and consumer of the commodities they present, like Greg in the previous piece (Anbouba, 2024) and the husband quoted before him (Krieger, 2025), men were occasionally present in the magazines’ narrative on GLP-1s. A rare piece that centered male bodies in the Ozempic Era was published by Vogue (Criales-Unzueta, 2025). Criales-Unzueta narrowed their focus on a particular health and wellness trend that both mirrors and masculinizes the Ozempic “craze” found elsewhere in the magazine: an obsession with protein, particularly among young men. Criales-Unzueta contextualized the protein obsession in the larger conversation about reshaping the body in the Ozempic Era stating, “protein chic is related to our fascination with wellness, but it’s also a cultural side effect of the abundance of weight loss drugs in the market now – what does one do after getting thinner? ‘Tone’ with more muscle definition” (n.p). The work required to “tone” is implied but it addresses the underlying concern expressed elsewhere that GLP-1s offer up the idealized body without any perceived effort.

The specter of work ethic and weight loss appeared in other spaces as well. While discussing the new modesty-oriented dress code at Cannes Film Festival in May 2025 that banned sheer and highly revealing clothing for women, Elle’s Veronique Hyland considered the longer-term implications of Ozempic for the cultural valuation of the body (beyond the obvious socially conservative shift the ban represented). She posited that the ban merely vocalized a larger shift away from “naked dressing” that was already taking place, with GLP-1s as a potential driver. Hyland mused on the possible reasons behind the cultural shift and concluded, “if the new ideal body is not so hard-won and increasingly attainable is showcasing it in the same way really a priority?” (Hyland, 2025: n.p.). Hyland’s remarks lump the body into the logic of the fashion diffusion cycle: once saturation is reached on a formerly limited commodity – whether the latest sneaker or idealized body shape – its special essence is diluted to the point of mundanity.

Taking up space: Fat bodies in the Ozempic era

Personal accounts of fat women (Annan-Lewin, 2023, 2024; Okwodu, 2022) expanded the magazine discourse to include the lived reality of being fat and trying to dress a fat body in the Ozempic Era. The language of these articles promoted the basic idea that, despite the rise of GLP-1s, fat bodies very much continued to live, thrive, and get dressed, whether the fashion industry decided to take note of them or not.

Though Okwodu’s first-person narrative – published in Vogue’s March 2022 print issue and available to subscribers online – did not mention GLP-1s, the material consequences of fashion’s obsession with thinness, and the “problem” of her body literally unable to fit in was articulated throughout the narrative. She shared her relationship to fashion in her teenage years and beyond as one of disappointment and exclusion. Okwodu mentioned one designer she was sent to interview (unnamed but easily identified through description) who commented on her presence backstage “that she couldn’t believe they’d ‘let in the trolls’” (Okwodu, 2022: 116). However, Okwodu ended on a triumphant note. She celebrated the many gains she’s observed in the fashionable options available from brands interested in her as a consumer. The positive tone and softened critique via the celebration of more options for consumption allowed Okwodu’s joy and pleasure of being able to be both fat and fashionable to overshadow the slights she has experienced in her career due to her body.

Vogue’s digital-only content has been more varied and robust in terms of speaking openly and critically of the return to a thin-obsessed culture. Clearly labeled “Opinion” piece at the top of her digital-only contribution – an excerpt from her book that is linked to in the piece as any other product promoted by Vogue might be – Emma Specter’s reflections on the temptations of Ozempic after a lifetime of disordered eating broke from the sanctioned tone of Okwodu’s editorial published in the print magazine. Specter wrote of “making the move from ‘objectively thin person terrified of fat’ to ‘actually fat person living in the world’ hasn’t always been easy; indeed, it’s necessitated years’ worth of therapy, endless searching for forms of exercise that would actually make me feel good in my body” and family and friends who “are always there to remind me of [their support] when I wake up on a post- binge day and feel as rudderless and lost and failure-defined as I ever did” (n.p.)

Annan-Lewin’s (2023) candid perspective published in Elle provided insight into the lived experience of a woman who wears a size 22 and who has been taking Ozempic to treat symptoms related to PCOS. She explained what it has been like to watch the industry suddenly undercut the modest body inclusivity gains made over the past decade, framing the use of Ozempic as a “pandemic” in the fashion industry. She spoke of the need to reclaim space for her fat body, a body that is also taking Ozempic but for very different reasons than those around her. In one anecdote she reflected:

“At first, people are excited to hear about [someone’s Ozempic use at a dinner party]: everyone will ask how it is and think it’s really cool, until I speak up and say, ‘Here’s an actual fat person — not fat as in me not liking myself, but clinically obese — taking Ozempic because my PCOS means I’m struggling to lose weight and I don’t want to become pre-diabetic. I’m the type of person that this drug is for.’ That’s usually when the awkwardness hits” (Annan-Lewin, 2023: n.p.).

In another article, Annan-Lewin describes skinny as an “aspirational state” in the fashion industry (2024: n.p.). The rise of the Ozempic Era, she feels, has given fashion folks more license to talk about and celebrate skinny bodies, a type of body diversity regression. Like Okwudo, Annan-Lewin name drops several fashion brands she personally goes to when dressing her own body, fulfilling the “news you can use” edict of lifestyle media. However, she also intersects the fashion industry’s obsessions with thinness with other pervasive issues: gender and race. She identifies the root of skinny hegemony in the fact that “this is still an industry largely run by white men, who are still holding up a very narrow, Westernized beauty standard as the goal. We’re being sold the male gaze.” (n.p.). Annan-Lewin is thus doing the rarest thing in fashion journalism, holding truth to power.

Within the timeframe studied, Elle also published an excerpt from Evette Dionne’s 2022 book, Weightless, in which she documented her experience with unintentional weight loss due to a medical condition and the positive reactions of those around her (Dionne, 2022: n.p.). She stated, “from the perspective of those issuing these compliments, even if the weight loss is the consequence of debilitating illness that could ultimately kill me, the sickness was worth it” as “my old clothes hang off my frame as if they once belonged to someone else” (n.p.) The medical reason behind her esthetic transformation was, as Dionne documents, heartbreakingly ignored, her “feelings cast aside as people gush about how good she [looked]” (n.p.). She expanded her view to famous women who have been scrutinized for their weight loss, whether intentional or not, questioning the continued public obsession with thinness and the fatphobia that hides beneath the compliments.

That Janelle Okwodu, Jeanie Annan-Lewin, and Evette Dionne are fat black women, publishing in a field that has historically excluded both their bodies and voices, offers opportunity to reflect on the intersectional nature of body acceptance movements and their influence on the fashion/lifestyle media ecosystem. Early body positivity movements of the 1990s were largely headed by fat, black, and queer women. They modeled their campaigns on the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s, “as radical fat activists recognized the interconnected nature of fat liberation with broader struggles against oppression” (Rowe, 2025: 43). Sporadically in the 2010s and then in the immediate aftermath of George Floyd’s killing in 2020, the fashion industry was pressed to make concerted efforts to address the continued marginalization and mis/underrepresentation of Black folks across sectors, from board rooms to magazine covers. There have been continued and valid critiques that fashion has not done enough in the intervening years and is even seeming to back-peddle as a rise in anti-DEI fervor takes hold. The rise of the Ozempic Era further threatens to return the industry and its media to a world where only the wealthy, white, and/or skinny are worthy of consideration. However, the inclusion of Annan-Lewin and Okwodu’s voices in this one very specific discourse illustrates what can be gained when the fashion and lifestyle press employ and represent lived experiences beyond its historically narrow margins. As Rowe (2025) notes, “there is a history of Black feminist politic that insists upon ‘reclaiming the body’ or ‘reclaiming beauty’ through modes of image making, representation, consumption, and adornment” (p. 50). Because of the intersectional nature of our bodies, hiring a more diverse pool of fashion journalists and/or diversifying our own fashion media diets to include historically marginalized perspective will inevitably enrichen our relationship to fashion and our embodied experience of it.

Conclusion

The pervasiveness of anti-fat rhetoric and beliefs in American society are so deeply entrenched, it can be difficult to isolate the specific ways in which these beliefs are constantly and repeatedly reinforced. In the tradition of fat studies, I “[offer] no opposition to the simple fact of human weight diversity, but instead [look] at what people and societies make of this reality” (Wann, 2009: x). I approached the discourse from the position that the fashion industry’s narrow definition of acceptable bodies is a social problem, one in which the (fashion) press plays a role in perpetuating. With whichever lens one examines the discourse of the Ozempic Era, the social construction of the body in media will always be entangled with discourses on esthetics, religion/spirituality, politics, socioeconomics, science, gender, medicine, and so on. This project illustrated the salience and intertextuality of these concomitant discourses which inform the contemporary valuation and assessment of the body in fashion and lifestyle media while reporting on a drug intended to physically and socially reshape it.

The preface Volonté (2022) wrote for his work on Fat Fashion illustrates just how quickly the industry did an about face and how tenuous any gains made really are. Volonté mused whether the time had already passed for a work that focused on the fatphobia of the industry considering the number of curve models that had recently graced the runways. He carries on anyway, acknowledging that the presence of a curve model on a couple of runways does not negate her strangeness in being there in the first place (2022: p. viii). Skinny-as-the-default is so entrenched in fashion’s social consciousness – as well as the public’s perception of the fashion industry – that it barely seems worth stating. The habitus of fashion for much of the 20th and 21st centuries has prioritized thin bodies with only minor exceptions for “plus size” bodies. The body positivity and diversity movements over the last 60 years were noble attempts to formally redraw the lines to officially include all bodies as fashion bodies.

With the rise of GLP-1s, however, larger bodies have once again been remarginalized on both the runway and in fashion’s editorial pages – suggesting body inclusivity campaigns had not made very significant inroads. There are credible reports documenting reduced visibility of fat bodies on the runway in the most recent fashion weeks (Shoaib, 2025). The speed with which the fashion establishment abandoned the movement toward size inclusivity indicates the entrenchment of “thin is in” as the “natural” state of the fashion sphere. What this analysis demonstrates, however, is that some in the fashion press, at least, continue to grapple over the conception and construction of the body within its pages – offering a site for counter-discourses to emerge in interesting and surprising ways. Particularly, the candid and first-person accounts written by fat women and published in American Vogue and Elle were highly notable, if isolated, contributions that provided nuance and moved the conversation on the struggles of fashion bodies to be anything but thin from the hypothetical into the realm of lived experience.