Turns Out Body Positivity Was a Pop-Up

Second Thoughts is Dandelion Chandelier’s short-form fashion and luxury column: sharp, slightly contrarian essays about the details that deserve a second look.

If the runway looks skinnier again in 2026, you’re not imagining it—and the point isn’t about nostalgia, it’s about power. Size inclusion that isn’t built into samples, casting, and buying decisions will always ultimately be a passing fancy: here for a season, gone the next. Real luxury is respect and open-to-buy for all body types and sizes. Anything else is scarcity theater.

At a glance: February 2026 • Paris couture + menswear • thinness returns, GLP-1 visibility, and what luxury looks like

thinness makes a comeback

Models have always been skinny. That’s not the headline.

The news is the visible tightening—the sense that the recent Paris haute couture and menswear seasons are signaling a return to a more aggressively narrow ideal. Vanessa Friedman’s reporting in the New York Times (which has been summarized and widely discussed across fashion media this month) traces how quickly size inclusivity can slide from “moment” back to “exception,” with GLP-1s, conservative taste cycles, and supply-chain economics all cited as part of the mix.

When a seasoned critic says the models are getting skinnier again, it’s not a vibe; it’s an audit. Many viewers clocked it during Paris couture and menswear: the bodies on the runway looked noticeably thinner than even a couple of years ago. The numbers back this up. In the Vogue Business Fall/Winter 2026 menswear analysis (2,523 looks across 55 shows in Milan and Paris), mid-size representation on the runway was 0.8%. And plus-size was 0.2%. For the mens’ shows.

This moment belongs to the same cultural cycle explored in Unavailable Is a Lifestyle — a shift toward luxury as restriction, silence, and edited access rather than inclusion, generosity, or abundance.

the transaction is the tell

Runway casting is a signal. The real story unfolds elsewhere: online, on the sales floor, at trunk shows, in made-to-order appointments, and in the quiet choreography of how a brand anticipates the body before it ever meets it.

Most luxury clients today don’t rely on what just happens to be on the retail floor. They shop digitally. Commit in advance. They place orders months ahead of delivery. This is the same woman who builds a wardrobe strategically—thinking in terms of movement, authority, and repeat wear, the way we’ve explored in Call to Order when clothing is meant to carry you through real power moments, not just photographs.

For a professional woman, it’s easier than ever to create a work-around if you’re larger than a designer size 6 (or a French 38). If you plan ahead, you might land the look you’re after. Still, it’s not the same. You feel it in the language. Yes, the piece exists. Yes, it can be made. No, it isn’t offered as a matter of course. The message isn’t scarcity; it’s hierarchy. Some bodies are assumed. Others are managed. That distinction mirrors what shows up after dark, too—who moves easily through a room, and who feels they’re borrowing elegance rather than inhabiting it, a tension we return to often in Dusk & the City.

And the tell isn’t whether a size can be sourced. It’s whether it was imagined in the first place.

what this means when you’re Black

Here’s the layer that makes this moment land harder for me than “fashion is being fashion again.”

As a Black woman, I’ve spent my life watching certain bodies get treated as the default setting for beauty, elegance, and desirability—while other bodies are treated as deviations that must be disciplined into acceptability. When the culture returns to thinness as the primary proof of “beautiful,” it doesn’t just reheat diet culture; it tightens a broader standard that has historically been coded as neutral while operating as exclusion.

Body positivity, at its best, wasn’t only about size. It was also about who gets to look expensive without translation—whose presence reads as inherently fashion, whose curves and proportions aren’t treated as a problem to solve. When the silhouette narrows again, that wider permission narrows with it.

considering khaite

One of the most commercially successful new luxury brands of the past decade offers an instructive contrast. Khaite’s official size guide maps letter sizes to conventional numeric ranges (for example, S corresponds to US 4). Yet many women experience Khaite in practice as ease-forward—cuts that don’t feel punitive, garments that meet the body rather than disciplining it.

That’s not a mistake in patternmaking. It’s a decision about how a woman is meant to feel in the clothes: unselfconscious, held, and entirely unsurprised by her own body.

And the brand’s success suggests something the runway forgets every few cycles: luxury does not need bodily diminishment to feel elite. It needs authority, proportion, and dignity. When a garment meets your body without argument, it doesn’t feel inclusive. It feels inevitable.

so . . . now what?

Luxury does as it likes, for the most part. And for the most part, that’s fine.

If a house wants its runway to remain in the realm of fantasy, okay. But the smart ones will get real when the lights come up: broader size runs, made-to-order pathways that feel like service (not penance), and buying strategies that don’t treat adult bodies as an inventory risk.

Because here is the Second Thought that matters most: if a brand cannot imagine you in its clothes, it does not deserve to dress you.

faqs: thinness returns to the runway as the look of luxury

Are models actually getting skinnier again?

Recent runway reporting and size-inclusivity tracking show an overwhelming dominance of straight-size casting, with very low mid-size and plus-size representation.

Is this “just the ’80s” coming back?

Aesthetic nostalgia plays a role, but when fashion resurrects a decade’s silhouette, it often resurrects its body rules too—especially when sample-size systems stay the same.

What do GLP-1 drugs have to do with this?

They didn’t create thinness as an ideal, but multiple outlets and analysts link the recent cultural tightening to GLP-1 visibility and the renewed social acceptability of aggressive thinness.

Why does this conversation feel different for Black women?

Because dominant beauty ideals have long been racialized and coded as “neutral,” so a return to thinness-as-proof can function as a return to older hierarchies about who is read as effortlessly elegant.

What does Khaite’s sizing tell us?

Even within conventional size mapping, designing for ease—rather than punishment—creates a sense of dignity that clients experience as real luxury.

What should shoppers do with this information?

Treat it as signal detection: notice which brands make you feel expected (through sizing, stocking, and service) and which make you feel like an exception—then spend accordingly.