So they folded up their tents and left the stage
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Felicity Hayward, a model and activist, thinks 2023 was a turning point. “Ozempic arrived into our industry, and there was a definite change,” she says. Hayward, who has modelled for Mac and appeared on the cover of i-D magazine, monitors the number of designers using curve models across the fashion weeks in London, Paris, New York and Milan for her report Inside the Curve. At first the drop was slow, but this season, she says, “we’ve started to see a huge decline. New York, which had 70 plus-size models in 2023, had 23 earlier this year. At the September 2024 London fashion week, 80 plus-size models were on the runway, but just 26 this year.”