of the United Kingdom’s capitol city.
Every brand in your closet was cut for a body that doesn't exist.
Inside each label's technical files sits a master fit block: one set of measurements standing in for a whole size range, an imaginary average that patterns are graded up and down from.
Most brands revisit it once every three to five years. And for most of fashion's history, that lag was harmless because bodies changed slowly enough that a block drawn in 2021 still described the customer in 2024.
That is no longer true. GLP-1s broke the process, and we’re only now starting to see the consequences.
Around this time last year, I wrote about how influencer culture and the feed were doing the quiet work of normalizing the drugs. That work is finished. Usage has surged, the stigma has fallen, the medication comes as a pill now, and Serena Williams, once a face of the body-acceptance movement, sells it in Super Bowl spots. Demi Moore's chiseled biceps circulate on gossip accounts like red-carpet accessories. The body has become content, and the content is moving the market.
While GLP-1s certainly do offer myriad health benefits, they’re also fundamentally changing how we consume:
- People are drinking less alcohol
- They’re spending less on groceries; sometimes, they forget to eat altogether.
- Some, however, are also consuming more protein and lifting more weights to prevent muscle loss and bone density issues.
Trade media outlets are connecting these realities to the clearest surface-level outcomes. When bodies shrink (10-15% of their total body weight, on average), they need smaller clothes. Retailers’ assortment plans have undergone massive upheaval, and brands like David’s Bridal are offering new fit guarantees to reassure brides that they can have their wedding gowns resized after their weight loss. Retailers are also struggling to keep pace with a jump in returns they’re seeing in larger sizes.
Up to 23% of US households use GLP-1 medications, according to Circana research, and 80% expect to buy new clothes.
- Circana
This is a form of fit volatility: bodies are changing faster than the systems building garments for them. It’s something that Liza Amlani of the Retail Strategy Group has spent the past year discussing with merchants.
“Bodies are significantly changing, and very quickly,” Amlani said in a recent conversation with Future Commerce. “Within weeks, in some cases. Brands can’t keep up. They’re not set up to keep up.”
But there is another layer to this conversation that is just starting to stratify. When bodies shrink, consumers don’t just need smaller sizes… they want to completely rethink how they express themselves through fashion.
Confidence is a commercial variable driving new trends and aesthetics. Social media feeds are embracing the maximalist dressing trend that Pinterest initially uncovered in its annual predictions for 2026. Consumers are steering away from oatmeal color palettes and embracing more prints, more colors, and more fabrics.
Amlani spent most of her career inside the walls of Ralph Lauren and Club Monaco in merchandising roles. She spent the early part of her career as a buyer and product developer for Club Monaco. And now that she’s on the outside, helping merchants adapt their product development strategies to keep pace with new cultural trends, she too is finding history repeating itself.
How is the mainstream adoption of GLP-1s disrupting the way brands design and produce fashion?
Liza Amlani: Every brand develops its own sizing standards. There’s no universal standard anywhere in the world. To do that, each brand creates what’s called a master fit block, which is a set of measurements that represents each of its sizes, from small to medium, large, and so on. From that block, the brand creates and grades patterns, which means scaling those measurements up and down across the full size range. That master fit block is the foundation. And here’s the problem: most brands look at it every three to five years. Roughly 80% of brands operate this way.
Does that mean most brands are designing for a body that no longer fully exists?
LA: Exactly. And the product creation calendar compounds everything. Brands are working on 52-to-80-week timelines. By the time a garment is in the proto review phase, which is when the merchants and design team actually fit it on a fit model, the external body-shape landscape has already shifted. GLP-1 users are changing shape within weeks. You also have a significant number of women now strength training, which changes body shape in a completely different direction—broader shoulders, more muscular legs—but creates a silhouette that the brand’s fit block did not anticipate. Keep in mind that this can also vary by region, so consumers in certain regions are more likely to be on GLP-1s or to get plastic surgery.
Retailers are currently changing what sizes they stock, but they haven’t changed how the garment is built. A customer who has lost weight is not just a smaller version of themselves. Their proportions have changed. The relationships among the waist, hip, and shoulder differ. Fit block grading doesn’t automatically compensate for that. You need to go back further upstream.
And obviously, we’re not just talking about women, right?
LA: Right. Men are on GLP-1s too, and the implications extend well beyond retail apparel. It’s even impacting the uniform and PPE market for firefighters, construction workers, and military personnel. If someone’s body shape is changing and their protective gear no longer fits correctly, that’s a safety issue, not just a style issue. It illustrates how deep this runs. It’s a structural product creation problem across every garment category.
There seems to be two distinct layers here: the fit block, which is the technical standard, and then how the brand wants a garment to feel and look on the body. Can you explain that second layer?
LA: That second layer is what we call fit intent. During the design brief phase, when design and merch work together to plan a collection, they'll align on how they want each style to fit on the body. For example: oversized, slim-fit, classic, or relaxed. Those are fit intent descriptors, and they get communicated to technical design, who translate them into actual garment specs relative to the master fit block. The fit block is your reference standard, while fit intent is your creative direction on top of it.
The problem right now is that brands have been leaning heavily into oversized and relaxed silhouettes for several seasons. That's partly a trend, but it's also, honestly, a way to sidestep the fit problem. If everything is oversized, the fit block matters a lot less because the garment fits a much wider range of bodies. As consumer bodies change and confidence shifts, what people want to wear will change, and brands will need to consciously update both the fit block and fit intent.
People undergoing body transformation (for any reason) are also experiencing a shift in what they feel entitled to wear. If those boxy silhouettes, and even trends like minimalist fashion, were used as a tool for us to “hide ourselves” and not rely on fit blocks, are we going to see more maximalism?
LA: Quiet luxury has always existed, but it went to mass because it was a reflection of the cultural moment: the economy, the desire to be understated, aspirational minimalism as a signal of taste, especially because of shows like “Succession” and “Billions.” And minimalism, as you're suggesting, is also a very forgiving silhouette. A boxy shirt works on many bodies; a bodycon dress does not. So there's a design economics argument embedded in quiet luxury that nobody talks about.
But everything I've seen on the runway tells me we're shifting. Polka dots made a significant comeback for spring, and polka dots are not a subtle choice. I've always said animal prints are just another color. They're more accessible than a floral. People who would never wear a floral will wear animal print because it reads as a neutral to them. But now I'm seeing animal prints translate into fitness apparel and athleisure too, not just ready-to-wear. And when animal print shows up on Adidas Sambas, you know the print has crossed into the mainstream.
Is this an innate human behavior or a cultural one?
LA: It’s a human one, and I saw it firsthand at Ralph Lauren. When customers felt more confident, whether due to weight loss, a life change, a new relationship, or whatever, there were clear behavioral signatures. They leaned toward color first. Then toward more fitted silhouettes. Then toward prints and patterns. Not all at once; confidence builds in stages. The color came first, always. And then the bodycon. And then the bold. Brands that understand that sequence have an opportunity to walk a customer through it. Brands that don't will wonder why their seasonal colorways aren't moving.
The algorithm presents trends as if they're new, but we're often cycling back to them. The 90s were heroin chic. Thin was aspirational, and fashion reflected it: slip dresses, minimalist shapes, nothing that hid the body. Are there silhouettes or aesthetics from that era that you're seeing reemerge?
LA: Yes, and the most honest indicator isn't on the runway, but what’s in vintage store windows. When I walk past those stores now, it's all patterns, all bold, everything that got buried during the minimalism years. That's significant because what ends up in vintage stores is what people are actively shopping. Resale and thrift have exploded, and what consumers are actively searching for, finding, and choosing to wear is telling you exactly where personal style is going. It’s bolder, more layered, and more individual. It's not heroin chic coming back, but it is anti-minimalism that heroin chic's counterculture always wanted to be.
What are the cultural gaps preventing merchants from adapting effectively?
LA: This all adds up to something that many people forget: Fit and size are completely different. I think that’s a distinction that needs to be made more clearly across the entire product creation team, from technical design to design teams, and even planning teams. Planning teams are allocating sizes and forecasting. They know the size, but they don’t understand how fit impacts the product experience and how consumers feel wearing the garments.
Planning teams should be more immersed so they understand why they’re allocating more smalls in one region and more extra-larges in another. They’re not going into the store, and they’re not really living with design and merch, or seeing what their customers or competitors are doing. That disconnect within a brand is something brands need to start addressing.
For the brand executives, creatives, and even merchandisers reading Future Commerce…what can they actually move on now?
LA: Start by asking honest questions about your own process. How often is your fit reviewed and updated? When did you last look at your fit block, and was that review informed by actual customer-body data, or was it a standing internal review that defaulted to the previous standards? Then, ask whether you are actually talking to your customers. You can’t ask someone if they’re on a GLP-1, and you shouldn’t, but you can see behavioral shifts. Talk to your sales teams. Are customers shopping differently? Are they reaching for different categories? Returning things they would have kept before? Those patterns are signals. Act on them.
Every brand in your closet was cut for a body that doesn't exist.
Inside each label's technical files sits a master fit block: one set of measurements standing in for a whole size range, an imaginary average that patterns are graded up and down from.
Most brands revisit it once every three to five years. And for most of fashion's history, that lag was harmless because bodies changed slowly enough that a block drawn in 2021 still described the customer in 2024.
That is no longer true. GLP-1s broke the process, and we’re only now starting to see the consequences.
Around this time last year, I wrote about how influencer culture and the feed were doing the quiet work of normalizing the drugs. That work is finished. Usage has surged, the stigma has fallen, the medication comes as a pill now, and Serena Williams, once a face of the body-acceptance movement, sells it in Super Bowl spots. Demi Moore's chiseled biceps circulate on gossip accounts like red-carpet accessories. The body has become content, and the content is moving the market.
While GLP-1s certainly do offer myriad health benefits, they’re also fundamentally changing how we consume:
- People are drinking less alcohol
- They’re spending less on groceries; sometimes, they forget to eat altogether.
- Some, however, are also consuming more protein and lifting more weights to prevent muscle loss and bone density issues.
Trade media outlets are connecting these realities to the clearest surface-level outcomes. When bodies shrink (10-15% of their total body weight, on average), they need smaller clothes. Retailers’ assortment plans have undergone massive upheaval, and brands like David’s Bridal are offering new fit guarantees to reassure brides that they can have their wedding gowns resized after their weight loss. Retailers are also struggling to keep pace with a jump in returns they’re seeing in larger sizes.
Up to 23% of US households use GLP-1 medications, according to Circana research, and 80% expect to buy new clothes.
- Circana
This is a form of fit volatility: bodies are changing faster than the systems building garments for them. It’s something that Liza Amlani of the Retail Strategy Group has spent the past year discussing with merchants.
“Bodies are significantly changing, and very quickly,” Amlani said in a recent conversation with Future Commerce. “Within weeks, in some cases. Brands can’t keep up. They’re not set up to keep up.”
But there is another layer to this conversation that is just starting to stratify. When bodies shrink, consumers don’t just need smaller sizes… they want to completely rethink how they express themselves through fashion.
Confidence is a commercial variable driving new trends and aesthetics. Social media feeds are embracing the maximalist dressing trend that Pinterest initially uncovered in its annual predictions for 2026. Consumers are steering away from oatmeal color palettes and embracing more prints, more colors, and more fabrics.
Amlani spent most of her career inside the walls of Ralph Lauren and Club Monaco in merchandising roles. She spent the early part of her career as a buyer and product developer for Club Monaco. And now that she’s on the outside, helping merchants adapt their product development strategies to keep pace with new cultural trends, she too is finding history repeating itself.
How is the mainstream adoption of GLP-1s disrupting the way brands design and produce fashion?
Liza Amlani: Every brand develops its own sizing standards. There’s no universal standard anywhere in the world. To do that, each brand creates what’s called a master fit block, which is a set of measurements that represents each of its sizes, from small to medium, large, and so on. From that block, the brand creates and grades patterns, which means scaling those measurements up and down across the full size range. That master fit block is the foundation. And here’s the problem: most brands look at it every three to five years. Roughly 80% of brands operate this way.
Does that mean most brands are designing for a body that no longer fully exists?
LA: Exactly. And the product creation calendar compounds everything. Brands are working on 52-to-80-week timelines. By the time a garment is in the proto review phase, which is when the merchants and design team actually fit it on a fit model, the external body-shape landscape has already shifted. GLP-1 users are changing shape within weeks. You also have a significant number of women now strength training, which changes body shape in a completely different direction—broader shoulders, more muscular legs—but creates a silhouette that the brand’s fit block did not anticipate. Keep in mind that this can also vary by region, so consumers in certain regions are more likely to be on GLP-1s or to get plastic surgery.
Retailers are currently changing what sizes they stock, but they haven’t changed how the garment is built. A customer who has lost weight is not just a smaller version of themselves. Their proportions have changed. The relationships among the waist, hip, and shoulder differ. Fit block grading doesn’t automatically compensate for that. You need to go back further upstream.
And obviously, we’re not just talking about women, right?
LA: Right. Men are on GLP-1s too, and the implications extend well beyond retail apparel. It’s even impacting the uniform and PPE market for firefighters, construction workers, and military personnel. If someone’s body shape is changing and their protective gear no longer fits correctly, that’s a safety issue, not just a style issue. It illustrates how deep this runs. It’s a structural product creation problem across every garment category.
There seems to be two distinct layers here: the fit block, which is the technical standard, and then how the brand wants a garment to feel and look on the body. Can you explain that second layer?
LA: That second layer is what we call fit intent. During the design brief phase, when design and merch work together to plan a collection, they'll align on how they want each style to fit on the body. For example: oversized, slim-fit, classic, or relaxed. Those are fit intent descriptors, and they get communicated to technical design, who translate them into actual garment specs relative to the master fit block. The fit block is your reference standard, while fit intent is your creative direction on top of it.
The problem right now is that brands have been leaning heavily into oversized and relaxed silhouettes for several seasons. That's partly a trend, but it's also, honestly, a way to sidestep the fit problem. If everything is oversized, the fit block matters a lot less because the garment fits a much wider range of bodies. As consumer bodies change and confidence shifts, what people want to wear will change, and brands will need to consciously update both the fit block and fit intent.
People undergoing body transformation (for any reason) are also experiencing a shift in what they feel entitled to wear. If those boxy silhouettes, and even trends like minimalist fashion, were used as a tool for us to “hide ourselves” and not rely on fit blocks, are we going to see more maximalism?
LA: Quiet luxury has always existed, but it went to mass because it was a reflection of the cultural moment: the economy, the desire to be understated, aspirational minimalism as a signal of taste, especially because of shows like “Succession” and “Billions.” And minimalism, as you're suggesting, is also a very forgiving silhouette. A boxy shirt works on many bodies; a bodycon dress does not. So there's a design economics argument embedded in quiet luxury that nobody talks about.
But everything I've seen on the runway tells me we're shifting. Polka dots made a significant comeback for spring, and polka dots are not a subtle choice. I've always said animal prints are just another color. They're more accessible than a floral. People who would never wear a floral will wear animal print because it reads as a neutral to them. But now I'm seeing animal prints translate into fitness apparel and athleisure too, not just ready-to-wear. And when animal print shows up on Adidas Sambas, you know the print has crossed into the mainstream.
Is this an innate human behavior or a cultural one?
LA: It’s a human one, and I saw it firsthand at Ralph Lauren. When customers felt more confident, whether due to weight loss, a life change, a new relationship, or whatever, there were clear behavioral signatures. They leaned toward color first. Then toward more fitted silhouettes. Then toward prints and patterns. Not all at once; confidence builds in stages. The color came first, always. And then the bodycon. And then the bold. Brands that understand that sequence have an opportunity to walk a customer through it. Brands that don't will wonder why their seasonal colorways aren't moving.
The algorithm presents trends as if they're new, but we're often cycling back to them. The 90s were heroin chic. Thin was aspirational, and fashion reflected it: slip dresses, minimalist shapes, nothing that hid the body. Are there silhouettes or aesthetics from that era that you're seeing reemerge?
LA: Yes, and the most honest indicator isn't on the runway, but what’s in vintage store windows. When I walk past those stores now, it's all patterns, all bold, everything that got buried during the minimalism years. That's significant because what ends up in vintage stores is what people are actively shopping. Resale and thrift have exploded, and what consumers are actively searching for, finding, and choosing to wear is telling you exactly where personal style is going. It’s bolder, more layered, and more individual. It's not heroin chic coming back, but it is anti-minimalism that heroin chic's counterculture always wanted to be.
What are the cultural gaps preventing merchants from adapting effectively?
LA: This all adds up to something that many people forget: Fit and size are completely different. I think that’s a distinction that needs to be made more clearly across the entire product creation team, from technical design to design teams, and even planning teams. Planning teams are allocating sizes and forecasting. They know the size, but they don’t understand how fit impacts the product experience and how consumers feel wearing the garments.
Planning teams should be more immersed so they understand why they’re allocating more smalls in one region and more extra-larges in another. They’re not going into the store, and they’re not really living with design and merch, or seeing what their customers or competitors are doing. That disconnect within a brand is something brands need to start addressing.
For the brand executives, creatives, and even merchandisers reading Future Commerce…what can they actually move on now?
LA: Start by asking honest questions about your own process. How often is your fit reviewed and updated? When did you last look at your fit block, and was that review informed by actual customer-body data, or was it a standing internal review that defaulted to the previous standards? Then, ask whether you are actually talking to your customers. You can’t ask someone if they’re on a GLP-1, and you shouldn’t, but you can see behavioral shifts. Talk to your sales teams. Are customers shopping differently? Are they reaching for different categories? Returning things they would have kept before? Those patterns are signals. Act on them.
Every brand in your closet was cut for a body that doesn't exist.
Inside each label's technical files sits a master fit block: one set of measurements standing in for a whole size range, an imaginary average that patterns are graded up and down from.
Most brands revisit it once every three to five years. And for most of fashion's history, that lag was harmless because bodies changed slowly enough that a block drawn in 2021 still described the customer in 2024.
That is no longer true. GLP-1s broke the process, and we’re only now starting to see the consequences.
Around this time last year, I wrote about how influencer culture and the feed were doing the quiet work of normalizing the drugs. That work is finished. Usage has surged, the stigma has fallen, the medication comes as a pill now, and Serena Williams, once a face of the body-acceptance movement, sells it in Super Bowl spots. Demi Moore's chiseled biceps circulate on gossip accounts like red-carpet accessories. The body has become content, and the content is moving the market.
While GLP-1s certainly do offer myriad health benefits, they’re also fundamentally changing how we consume:
- People are drinking less alcohol
- They’re spending less on groceries; sometimes, they forget to eat altogether.
- Some, however, are also consuming more protein and lifting more weights to prevent muscle loss and bone density issues.
Trade media outlets are connecting these realities to the clearest surface-level outcomes. When bodies shrink (10-15% of their total body weight, on average), they need smaller clothes. Retailers’ assortment plans have undergone massive upheaval, and brands like David’s Bridal are offering new fit guarantees to reassure brides that they can have their wedding gowns resized after their weight loss. Retailers are also struggling to keep pace with a jump in returns they’re seeing in larger sizes.
Up to 23% of US households use GLP-1 medications, according to Circana research, and 80% expect to buy new clothes.
- Circana
This is a form of fit volatility: bodies are changing faster than the systems building garments for them. It’s something that Liza Amlani of the Retail Strategy Group has spent the past year discussing with merchants.
“Bodies are significantly changing, and very quickly,” Amlani said in a recent conversation with Future Commerce. “Within weeks, in some cases. Brands can’t keep up. They’re not set up to keep up.”
But there is another layer to this conversation that is just starting to stratify. When bodies shrink, consumers don’t just need smaller sizes… they want to completely rethink how they express themselves through fashion.
Confidence is a commercial variable driving new trends and aesthetics. Social media feeds are embracing the maximalist dressing trend that Pinterest initially uncovered in its annual predictions for 2026. Consumers are steering away from oatmeal color palettes and embracing more prints, more colors, and more fabrics.
Amlani spent most of her career inside the walls of Ralph Lauren and Club Monaco in merchandising roles. She spent the early part of her career as a buyer and product developer for Club Monaco. And now that she’s on the outside, helping merchants adapt their product development strategies to keep pace with new cultural trends, she too is finding history repeating itself.
How is the mainstream adoption of GLP-1s disrupting the way brands design and produce fashion?
Liza Amlani: Every brand develops its own sizing standards. There’s no universal standard anywhere in the world. To do that, each brand creates what’s called a master fit block, which is a set of measurements that represents each of its sizes, from small to medium, large, and so on. From that block, the brand creates and grades patterns, which means scaling those measurements up and down across the full size range. That master fit block is the foundation. And here’s the problem: most brands look at it every three to five years. Roughly 80% of brands operate this way.
Does that mean most brands are designing for a body that no longer fully exists?
LA: Exactly. And the product creation calendar compounds everything. Brands are working on 52-to-80-week timelines. By the time a garment is in the proto review phase, which is when the merchants and design team actually fit it on a fit model, the external body-shape landscape has already shifted. GLP-1 users are changing shape within weeks. You also have a significant number of women now strength training, which changes body shape in a completely different direction—broader shoulders, more muscular legs—but creates a silhouette that the brand’s fit block did not anticipate. Keep in mind that this can also vary by region, so consumers in certain regions are more likely to be on GLP-1s or to get plastic surgery.
Retailers are currently changing what sizes they stock, but they haven’t changed how the garment is built. A customer who has lost weight is not just a smaller version of themselves. Their proportions have changed. The relationships among the waist, hip, and shoulder differ. Fit block grading doesn’t automatically compensate for that. You need to go back further upstream.
And obviously, we’re not just talking about women, right?
LA: Right. Men are on GLP-1s too, and the implications extend well beyond retail apparel. It’s even impacting the uniform and PPE market for firefighters, construction workers, and military personnel. If someone’s body shape is changing and their protective gear no longer fits correctly, that’s a safety issue, not just a style issue. It illustrates how deep this runs. It’s a structural product creation problem across every garment category.
There seems to be two distinct layers here: the fit block, which is the technical standard, and then how the brand wants a garment to feel and look on the body. Can you explain that second layer?
LA: That second layer is what we call fit intent. During the design brief phase, when design and merch work together to plan a collection, they'll align on how they want each style to fit on the body. For example: oversized, slim-fit, classic, or relaxed. Those are fit intent descriptors, and they get communicated to technical design, who translate them into actual garment specs relative to the master fit block. The fit block is your reference standard, while fit intent is your creative direction on top of it.
The problem right now is that brands have been leaning heavily into oversized and relaxed silhouettes for several seasons. That's partly a trend, but it's also, honestly, a way to sidestep the fit problem. If everything is oversized, the fit block matters a lot less because the garment fits a much wider range of bodies. As consumer bodies change and confidence shifts, what people want to wear will change, and brands will need to consciously update both the fit block and fit intent.
People undergoing body transformation (for any reason) are also experiencing a shift in what they feel entitled to wear. If those boxy silhouettes, and even trends like minimalist fashion, were used as a tool for us to “hide ourselves” and not rely on fit blocks, are we going to see more maximalism?
LA: Quiet luxury has always existed, but it went to mass because it was a reflection of the cultural moment: the economy, the desire to be understated, aspirational minimalism as a signal of taste, especially because of shows like “Succession” and “Billions.” And minimalism, as you're suggesting, is also a very forgiving silhouette. A boxy shirt works on many bodies; a bodycon dress does not. So there's a design economics argument embedded in quiet luxury that nobody talks about.
But everything I've seen on the runway tells me we're shifting. Polka dots made a significant comeback for spring, and polka dots are not a subtle choice. I've always said animal prints are just another color. They're more accessible than a floral. People who would never wear a floral will wear animal print because it reads as a neutral to them. But now I'm seeing animal prints translate into fitness apparel and athleisure too, not just ready-to-wear. And when animal print shows up on Adidas Sambas, you know the print has crossed into the mainstream.
Is this an innate human behavior or a cultural one?
LA: It’s a human one, and I saw it firsthand at Ralph Lauren. When customers felt more confident, whether due to weight loss, a life change, a new relationship, or whatever, there were clear behavioral signatures. They leaned toward color first. Then toward more fitted silhouettes. Then toward prints and patterns. Not all at once; confidence builds in stages. The color came first, always. And then the bodycon. And then the bold. Brands that understand that sequence have an opportunity to walk a customer through it. Brands that don't will wonder why their seasonal colorways aren't moving.
The algorithm presents trends as if they're new, but we're often cycling back to them. The 90s were heroin chic. Thin was aspirational, and fashion reflected it: slip dresses, minimalist shapes, nothing that hid the body. Are there silhouettes or aesthetics from that era that you're seeing reemerge?
LA: Yes, and the most honest indicator isn't on the runway, but what’s in vintage store windows. When I walk past those stores now, it's all patterns, all bold, everything that got buried during the minimalism years. That's significant because what ends up in vintage stores is what people are actively shopping. Resale and thrift have exploded, and what consumers are actively searching for, finding, and choosing to wear is telling you exactly where personal style is going. It’s bolder, more layered, and more individual. It's not heroin chic coming back, but it is anti-minimalism that heroin chic's counterculture always wanted to be.
What are the cultural gaps preventing merchants from adapting effectively?
LA: This all adds up to something that many people forget: Fit and size are completely different. I think that’s a distinction that needs to be made more clearly across the entire product creation team, from technical design to design teams, and even planning teams. Planning teams are allocating sizes and forecasting. They know the size, but they don’t understand how fit impacts the product experience and how consumers feel wearing the garments.
Planning teams should be more immersed so they understand why they’re allocating more smalls in one region and more extra-larges in another. They’re not going into the store, and they’re not really living with design and merch, or seeing what their customers or competitors are doing. That disconnect within a brand is something brands need to start addressing.
For the brand executives, creatives, and even merchandisers reading Future Commerce…what can they actually move on now?
LA: Start by asking honest questions about your own process. How often is your fit reviewed and updated? When did you last look at your fit block, and was that review informed by actual customer-body data, or was it a standing internal review that defaulted to the previous standards? Then, ask whether you are actually talking to your customers. You can’t ask someone if they’re on a GLP-1, and you shouldn’t, but you can see behavioral shifts. Talk to your sales teams. Are customers shopping differently? Are they reaching for different categories? Returning things they would have kept before? Those patterns are signals. Act on them.
Every brand in your closet was cut for a body that doesn't exist.
Inside each label's technical files sits a master fit block: one set of measurements standing in for a whole size range, an imaginary average that patterns are graded up and down from.
Most brands revisit it once every three to five years. And for most of fashion's history, that lag was harmless because bodies changed slowly enough that a block drawn in 2021 still described the customer in 2024.
That is no longer true. GLP-1s broke the process, and we’re only now starting to see the consequences.
Around this time last year, I wrote about how influencer culture and the feed were doing the quiet work of normalizing the drugs. That work is finished. Usage has surged, the stigma has fallen, the medication comes as a pill now, and Serena Williams, once a face of the body-acceptance movement, sells it in Super Bowl spots. Demi Moore's chiseled biceps circulate on gossip accounts like red-carpet accessories. The body has become content, and the content is moving the market.
While GLP-1s certainly do offer myriad health benefits, they’re also fundamentally changing how we consume:
- People are drinking less alcohol
- They’re spending less on groceries; sometimes, they forget to eat altogether.
- Some, however, are also consuming more protein and lifting more weights to prevent muscle loss and bone density issues.
Trade media outlets are connecting these realities to the clearest surface-level outcomes. When bodies shrink (10-15% of their total body weight, on average), they need smaller clothes. Retailers’ assortment plans have undergone massive upheaval, and brands like David’s Bridal are offering new fit guarantees to reassure brides that they can have their wedding gowns resized after their weight loss. Retailers are also struggling to keep pace with a jump in returns they’re seeing in larger sizes.
Up to 23% of US households use GLP-1 medications, according to Circana research, and 80% expect to buy new clothes.
- Circana
This is a form of fit volatility: bodies are changing faster than the systems building garments for them. It’s something that Liza Amlani of the Retail Strategy Group has spent the past year discussing with merchants.
“Bodies are significantly changing, and very quickly,” Amlani said in a recent conversation with Future Commerce. “Within weeks, in some cases. Brands can’t keep up. They’re not set up to keep up.”
But there is another layer to this conversation that is just starting to stratify. When bodies shrink, consumers don’t just need smaller sizes… they want to completely rethink how they express themselves through fashion.
Confidence is a commercial variable driving new trends and aesthetics. Social media feeds are embracing the maximalist dressing trend that Pinterest initially uncovered in its annual predictions for 2026. Consumers are steering away from oatmeal color palettes and embracing more prints, more colors, and more fabrics.
Amlani spent most of her career inside the walls of Ralph Lauren and Club Monaco in merchandising roles. She spent the early part of her career as a buyer and product developer for Club Monaco. And now that she’s on the outside, helping merchants adapt their product development strategies to keep pace with new cultural trends, she too is finding history repeating itself.
How is the mainstream adoption of GLP-1s disrupting the way brands design and produce fashion?
Liza Amlani: Every brand develops its own sizing standards. There’s no universal standard anywhere in the world. To do that, each brand creates what’s called a master fit block, which is a set of measurements that represents each of its sizes, from small to medium, large, and so on. From that block, the brand creates and grades patterns, which means scaling those measurements up and down across the full size range. That master fit block is the foundation. And here’s the problem: most brands look at it every three to five years. Roughly 80% of brands operate this way.
Does that mean most brands are designing for a body that no longer fully exists?
LA: Exactly. And the product creation calendar compounds everything. Brands are working on 52-to-80-week timelines. By the time a garment is in the proto review phase, which is when the merchants and design team actually fit it on a fit model, the external body-shape landscape has already shifted. GLP-1 users are changing shape within weeks. You also have a significant number of women now strength training, which changes body shape in a completely different direction—broader shoulders, more muscular legs—but creates a silhouette that the brand’s fit block did not anticipate. Keep in mind that this can also vary by region, so consumers in certain regions are more likely to be on GLP-1s or to get plastic surgery.
Retailers are currently changing what sizes they stock, but they haven’t changed how the garment is built. A customer who has lost weight is not just a smaller version of themselves. Their proportions have changed. The relationships among the waist, hip, and shoulder differ. Fit block grading doesn’t automatically compensate for that. You need to go back further upstream.
And obviously, we’re not just talking about women, right?
LA: Right. Men are on GLP-1s too, and the implications extend well beyond retail apparel. It’s even impacting the uniform and PPE market for firefighters, construction workers, and military personnel. If someone’s body shape is changing and their protective gear no longer fits correctly, that’s a safety issue, not just a style issue. It illustrates how deep this runs. It’s a structural product creation problem across every garment category.
There seems to be two distinct layers here: the fit block, which is the technical standard, and then how the brand wants a garment to feel and look on the body. Can you explain that second layer?
LA: That second layer is what we call fit intent. During the design brief phase, when design and merch work together to plan a collection, they'll align on how they want each style to fit on the body. For example: oversized, slim-fit, classic, or relaxed. Those are fit intent descriptors, and they get communicated to technical design, who translate them into actual garment specs relative to the master fit block. The fit block is your reference standard, while fit intent is your creative direction on top of it.
The problem right now is that brands have been leaning heavily into oversized and relaxed silhouettes for several seasons. That's partly a trend, but it's also, honestly, a way to sidestep the fit problem. If everything is oversized, the fit block matters a lot less because the garment fits a much wider range of bodies. As consumer bodies change and confidence shifts, what people want to wear will change, and brands will need to consciously update both the fit block and fit intent.
People undergoing body transformation (for any reason) are also experiencing a shift in what they feel entitled to wear. If those boxy silhouettes, and even trends like minimalist fashion, were used as a tool for us to “hide ourselves” and not rely on fit blocks, are we going to see more maximalism?
LA: Quiet luxury has always existed, but it went to mass because it was a reflection of the cultural moment: the economy, the desire to be understated, aspirational minimalism as a signal of taste, especially because of shows like “Succession” and “Billions.” And minimalism, as you're suggesting, is also a very forgiving silhouette. A boxy shirt works on many bodies; a bodycon dress does not. So there's a design economics argument embedded in quiet luxury that nobody talks about.
But everything I've seen on the runway tells me we're shifting. Polka dots made a significant comeback for spring, and polka dots are not a subtle choice. I've always said animal prints are just another color. They're more accessible than a floral. People who would never wear a floral will wear animal print because it reads as a neutral to them. But now I'm seeing animal prints translate into fitness apparel and athleisure too, not just ready-to-wear. And when animal print shows up on Adidas Sambas, you know the print has crossed into the mainstream.
Is this an innate human behavior or a cultural one?
LA: It’s a human one, and I saw it firsthand at Ralph Lauren. When customers felt more confident, whether due to weight loss, a life change, a new relationship, or whatever, there were clear behavioral signatures. They leaned toward color first. Then toward more fitted silhouettes. Then toward prints and patterns. Not all at once; confidence builds in stages. The color came first, always. And then the bodycon. And then the bold. Brands that understand that sequence have an opportunity to walk a customer through it. Brands that don't will wonder why their seasonal colorways aren't moving.
The algorithm presents trends as if they're new, but we're often cycling back to them. The 90s were heroin chic. Thin was aspirational, and fashion reflected it: slip dresses, minimalist shapes, nothing that hid the body. Are there silhouettes or aesthetics from that era that you're seeing reemerge?
LA: Yes, and the most honest indicator isn't on the runway, but what’s in vintage store windows. When I walk past those stores now, it's all patterns, all bold, everything that got buried during the minimalism years. That's significant because what ends up in vintage stores is what people are actively shopping. Resale and thrift have exploded, and what consumers are actively searching for, finding, and choosing to wear is telling you exactly where personal style is going. It’s bolder, more layered, and more individual. It's not heroin chic coming back, but it is anti-minimalism that heroin chic's counterculture always wanted to be.
What are the cultural gaps preventing merchants from adapting effectively?
LA: This all adds up to something that many people forget: Fit and size are completely different. I think that’s a distinction that needs to be made more clearly across the entire product creation team, from technical design to design teams, and even planning teams. Planning teams are allocating sizes and forecasting. They know the size, but they don’t understand how fit impacts the product experience and how consumers feel wearing the garments.
Planning teams should be more immersed so they understand why they’re allocating more smalls in one region and more extra-larges in another. They’re not going into the store, and they’re not really living with design and merch, or seeing what their customers or competitors are doing. That disconnect within a brand is something brands need to start addressing.
For the brand executives, creatives, and even merchandisers reading Future Commerce…what can they actually move on now?
LA: Start by asking honest questions about your own process. How often is your fit reviewed and updated? When did you last look at your fit block, and was that review informed by actual customer-body data, or was it a standing internal review that defaulted to the previous standards? Then, ask whether you are actually talking to your customers. You can’t ask someone if they’re on a GLP-1, and you shouldn’t, but you can see behavioral shifts. Talk to your sales teams. Are customers shopping differently? Are they reaching for different categories? Returning things they would have kept before? Those patterns are signals. Act on them.
Every brand in your closet was cut for a body that doesn't exist.
Inside each label's technical files sits a master fit block: one set of measurements standing in for a whole size range, an imaginary average that patterns are graded up and down from.
Most brands revisit it once every three to five years. And for most of fashion's history, that lag was harmless because bodies changed slowly enough that a block drawn in 2021 still described the customer in 2024.
That is no longer true. GLP-1s broke the process, and we’re only now starting to see the consequences.
Around this time last year, I wrote about how influencer culture and the feed were doing the quiet work of normalizing the drugs. That work is finished. Usage has surged, the stigma has fallen, the medication comes as a pill now, and Serena Williams, once a face of the body-acceptance movement, sells it in Super Bowl spots. Demi Moore's chiseled biceps circulate on gossip accounts like red-carpet accessories. The body has become content, and the content is moving the market.
While GLP-1s certainly do offer myriad health benefits, they’re also fundamentally changing how we consume:
- People are drinking less alcohol
- They’re spending less on groceries; sometimes, they forget to eat altogether.
- Some, however, are also consuming more protein and lifting more weights to prevent muscle loss and bone density issues.
Trade media outlets are connecting these realities to the clearest surface-level outcomes. When bodies shrink (10-15% of their total body weight, on average), they need smaller clothes. Retailers’ assortment plans have undergone massive upheaval, and brands like David’s Bridal are offering new fit guarantees to reassure brides that they can have their wedding gowns resized after their weight loss. Retailers are also struggling to keep pace with a jump in returns they’re seeing in larger sizes.
Up to 23% of US households use GLP-1 medications, according to Circana research, and 80% expect to buy new clothes.
- Circana
This is a form of fit volatility: bodies are changing faster than the systems building garments for them. It’s something that Liza Amlani of the Retail Strategy Group has spent the past year discussing with merchants.
“Bodies are significantly changing, and very quickly,” Amlani said in a recent conversation with Future Commerce. “Within weeks, in some cases. Brands can’t keep up. They’re not set up to keep up.”
But there is another layer to this conversation that is just starting to stratify. When bodies shrink, consumers don’t just need smaller sizes… they want to completely rethink how they express themselves through fashion.
Confidence is a commercial variable driving new trends and aesthetics. Social media feeds are embracing the maximalist dressing trend that Pinterest initially uncovered in its annual predictions for 2026. Consumers are steering away from oatmeal color palettes and embracing more prints, more colors, and more fabrics.
Amlani spent most of her career inside the walls of Ralph Lauren and Club Monaco in merchandising roles. She spent the early part of her career as a buyer and product developer for Club Monaco. And now that she’s on the outside, helping merchants adapt their product development strategies to keep pace with new cultural trends, she too is finding history repeating itself.
How is the mainstream adoption of GLP-1s disrupting the way brands design and produce fashion?
Liza Amlani: Every brand develops its own sizing standards. There’s no universal standard anywhere in the world. To do that, each brand creates what’s called a master fit block, which is a set of measurements that represents each of its sizes, from small to medium, large, and so on. From that block, the brand creates and grades patterns, which means scaling those measurements up and down across the full size range. That master fit block is the foundation. And here’s the problem: most brands look at it every three to five years. Roughly 80% of brands operate this way.
Does that mean most brands are designing for a body that no longer fully exists?
LA: Exactly. And the product creation calendar compounds everything. Brands are working on 52-to-80-week timelines. By the time a garment is in the proto review phase, which is when the merchants and design team actually fit it on a fit model, the external body-shape landscape has already shifted. GLP-1 users are changing shape within weeks. You also have a significant number of women now strength training, which changes body shape in a completely different direction—broader shoulders, more muscular legs—but creates a silhouette that the brand’s fit block did not anticipate. Keep in mind that this can also vary by region, so consumers in certain regions are more likely to be on GLP-1s or to get plastic surgery.
Retailers are currently changing what sizes they stock, but they haven’t changed how the garment is built. A customer who has lost weight is not just a smaller version of themselves. Their proportions have changed. The relationships among the waist, hip, and shoulder differ. Fit block grading doesn’t automatically compensate for that. You need to go back further upstream.
And obviously, we’re not just talking about women, right?
LA: Right. Men are on GLP-1s too, and the implications extend well beyond retail apparel. It’s even impacting the uniform and PPE market for firefighters, construction workers, and military personnel. If someone’s body shape is changing and their protective gear no longer fits correctly, that’s a safety issue, not just a style issue. It illustrates how deep this runs. It’s a structural product creation problem across every garment category.
There seems to be two distinct layers here: the fit block, which is the technical standard, and then how the brand wants a garment to feel and look on the body. Can you explain that second layer?
LA: That second layer is what we call fit intent. During the design brief phase, when design and merch work together to plan a collection, they'll align on how they want each style to fit on the body. For example: oversized, slim-fit, classic, or relaxed. Those are fit intent descriptors, and they get communicated to technical design, who translate them into actual garment specs relative to the master fit block. The fit block is your reference standard, while fit intent is your creative direction on top of it.
The problem right now is that brands have been leaning heavily into oversized and relaxed silhouettes for several seasons. That's partly a trend, but it's also, honestly, a way to sidestep the fit problem. If everything is oversized, the fit block matters a lot less because the garment fits a much wider range of bodies. As consumer bodies change and confidence shifts, what people want to wear will change, and brands will need to consciously update both the fit block and fit intent.
People undergoing body transformation (for any reason) are also experiencing a shift in what they feel entitled to wear. If those boxy silhouettes, and even trends like minimalist fashion, were used as a tool for us to “hide ourselves” and not rely on fit blocks, are we going to see more maximalism?
LA: Quiet luxury has always existed, but it went to mass because it was a reflection of the cultural moment: the economy, the desire to be understated, aspirational minimalism as a signal of taste, especially because of shows like “Succession” and “Billions.” And minimalism, as you're suggesting, is also a very forgiving silhouette. A boxy shirt works on many bodies; a bodycon dress does not. So there's a design economics argument embedded in quiet luxury that nobody talks about.
But everything I've seen on the runway tells me we're shifting. Polka dots made a significant comeback for spring, and polka dots are not a subtle choice. I've always said animal prints are just another color. They're more accessible than a floral. People who would never wear a floral will wear animal print because it reads as a neutral to them. But now I'm seeing animal prints translate into fitness apparel and athleisure too, not just ready-to-wear. And when animal print shows up on Adidas Sambas, you know the print has crossed into the mainstream.
Is this an innate human behavior or a cultural one?
LA: It’s a human one, and I saw it firsthand at Ralph Lauren. When customers felt more confident, whether due to weight loss, a life change, a new relationship, or whatever, there were clear behavioral signatures. They leaned toward color first. Then toward more fitted silhouettes. Then toward prints and patterns. Not all at once; confidence builds in stages. The color came first, always. And then the bodycon. And then the bold. Brands that understand that sequence have an opportunity to walk a customer through it. Brands that don't will wonder why their seasonal colorways aren't moving.
The algorithm presents trends as if they're new, but we're often cycling back to them. The 90s were heroin chic. Thin was aspirational, and fashion reflected it: slip dresses, minimalist shapes, nothing that hid the body. Are there silhouettes or aesthetics from that era that you're seeing reemerge?
LA: Yes, and the most honest indicator isn't on the runway, but what’s in vintage store windows. When I walk past those stores now, it's all patterns, all bold, everything that got buried during the minimalism years. That's significant because what ends up in vintage stores is what people are actively shopping. Resale and thrift have exploded, and what consumers are actively searching for, finding, and choosing to wear is telling you exactly where personal style is going. It’s bolder, more layered, and more individual. It's not heroin chic coming back, but it is anti-minimalism that heroin chic's counterculture always wanted to be.
What are the cultural gaps preventing merchants from adapting effectively?
LA: This all adds up to something that many people forget: Fit and size are completely different. I think that’s a distinction that needs to be made more clearly across the entire product creation team, from technical design to design teams, and even planning teams. Planning teams are allocating sizes and forecasting. They know the size, but they don’t understand how fit impacts the product experience and how consumers feel wearing the garments.
Planning teams should be more immersed so they understand why they’re allocating more smalls in one region and more extra-larges in another. They’re not going into the store, and they’re not really living with design and merch, or seeing what their customers or competitors are doing. That disconnect within a brand is something brands need to start addressing.
For the brand executives, creatives, and even merchandisers reading Future Commerce…what can they actually move on now?
LA: Start by asking honest questions about your own process. How often is your fit reviewed and updated? When did you last look at your fit block, and was that review informed by actual customer-body data, or was it a standing internal review that defaulted to the previous standards? Then, ask whether you are actually talking to your customers. You can’t ask someone if they’re on a GLP-1, and you shouldn’t, but you can see behavioral shifts. Talk to your sales teams. Are customers shopping differently? Are they reaching for different categories? Returning things they would have kept before? Those patterns are signals. Act on them.
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