It is true that the Food and Drug Administration’s approval of Ozempic for weight loss in 2021 coincided with the shrinking runway trend. However, Mr. Bonnouvrier of DNA Models said he believed something deeper was going on — that the swing away from body diversity was part of a general swing away from social progressivism.
“As much as anything, this is a cultural conversation,” Mr. Bonnouvrier said. With respect to model inclusivity, he said, brands “are walking away because of what is going on in the United States.”
Sara Ziff, the founder of the Model Alliance, an organization that champions models’ rights, agreed. Extreme thinness among models is “not really new — this kind of thing is cyclical,” she said. But this time around, she added, “it seems to echo the current political climate.”
“It’s frustrating to see the industry take a step back,” Ms. Ziff said. “When those on the creative side of fashion could be using their platform to share progressive values, it seems like many are acquiescing rather than pushing back.”
Peer pressure to diversify the runway in the wake of the #MeToo and Black Lives Matter movements led to a noticeable shift in conceptions of beauty, Mr. Bonnouvrier said. But with D.E.I. now under scrutiny as part of the Trump administration’s war on wokeness, its fashion expression, including diversity of size, is under pressure. A retreat to the most conservative and traditional approach for showcasing clothes means a retreat to old-fashioned stereotypes of beauty. And that generally translates to homogenous, largely white and thin models, despite the fact that such body types are not representative of the fashion-buying population at large.
As Ms. Taymour said, there’s a good business case to be made for demonstrating clearly that you “relate to all types of your customer base,” including all sizes. Sarah Burton, the new creative director of Givenchy and the former creative director of Alexander McQueen, said much the same, noting that she wanted Givenchy “to celebrate the multiplicity, beauty and strength of womanhood, free of narrow definitions of how we should look or see ourselves.”
Yet the trend continues to move in the opposite direction.
Mr. Bonnouvrier does not expect the trend to change anytime soon. “We feel like the door is closing, slowly but surely,” he said.
