Ecommerce, Body Neutrality & GLP-1s

how can we sell you the right size?

Everyday I watch the same thing happen in our Shopify dashboard. A customer purchases the same product in two sizes, a 36 and a 38 or an S and M, knowing that at least one will be returned. From a logistics standpoint, its annoying, but there is a greater issue. After more than a century of industrialised clothing, we still haven’t figured out how to tell someone something that will fit their body. Or maybe we have, and we’ve just decided not to.

The clothing industry is confusing for many reasons. But, sizing is deliberately unstandardised, an S at one store might be an M at the next, and both stores are actually lying. Vanity sizing is the practice of labelling clothes smaller than they are to try and sell more, consumers feel better buying a smaller size so brands compete to give consumers that feeling. Fast fashion companies like Zara have taken it even further, shifting their entire production sizing down by one to be able to appeal to younger consumers, meaning a 36 from 10 years ago now would be labeled a 38 or even 40. Layer on top of that country specific systems like French or Italian sizing running small, American running large, each shaped by cultural norms that have nothing to do with our actual measurements. So we have a system that was never really designed to tell you what fits, but designed to make you feel something.

For example, its become quite standard for ecommerce shops to add all measurements to their websites, to try and prevent consumers buying doubles or just getting pieces that don’t fit right. But the average person doesn’t know their hip measurement, and most are doing everything in their power to keep it that way. It’s not ignorance, its self preservation. The number has been made to feel like a sentence, and people obviously do what they can to avoid being judged. A fitting room is not a neutral space. It’s somewhere the body gets assessed and negotiated with. Buying two sizes online and returning one in the comfort of your own home is a loophole, a way to get dressed without submitting to that process. The industry created the anxiety and then built a returns infrastructure around it.

I have found myself on occasion being a fit model, which forces you to face your body, with recorded measurments and being central to discussions in rooms you’re standing literally in the middle of. A difficult position to be in, but somewhere it shifted for me, when you strip it back to clothes looking good, and not the body they are on it can be reframed. The question stops being ‘does this size make me feel good about myself’ and becomes ‘does this garment do what it’s supposed to do.’ I wear a 40 instead of a 38 in certain cuts because the extra two centimetres on the hip removes all the tension at the pocket and the pants hang the way they’re supposed to. How lucky, when you think about it, that clothes come in multiple sizes at all and that there is a version made for your body, if you’re willing to let go of what the label says about you.

Now there’s a new variable in the system, GLP-1 drugs like Ozempic are changing body sizes at a speed the industry has never seen before. A recent Circana report found that 55% of active GLP-1 users have bought new clothing or footwear, driven primarily by changing sizes. Wardrobes are being replaced, and the brands built around bodies the industry spent decades making people feel bad about are now paying for it. Torrid, one of the biggest plus-size retailers in the US, is closing 130 stores after net sales fell 9% in 2025. It would be easy to frame this as the market simply responding to demand. But there’s actually something more uncomfortable underneath it all: the drug and the dress were always selling the same thing. Buy this and feel better about yourself. Anxiety is the product, fashion brands monetised it first, now, pharmaceuticals just found a more direct way. The industry that has profited from the feeling that your body was the problem is now watching a pill solve it. Whether that’s progress or just a more expensive version of the same dream is something I’m still trying to figure out.

I sometimes wonder if any of this could be fixed structurally. Whether a standardised sizing system, one where an S actually means the same thing regardless of who made it or where, might loosen the grip the label has on us. Maybe? But I think the problem runs deeper than regulation. The size on a tag is a number but what we’ve made it mean is something else entirely. That’s been decades of work from media, marketing, and an industry in which it’s more profitable to sell aspiration than to sell clothes that fit. The bodies are changing now, chemically and naturally, whether our relationship to the tag changes with them is a different question. What I keep coming back to is how can we sell a product when no one wants to acknowledge the body carrying it?