Fashion loves Ozempic. Should we talk about it?
Life and Art from FT Weekend
Forhecz Topher
4.6 • 601 Ratings
🗓️ 14 October 2024
⏱️ 21 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Before she was the editor of our luxury magazine HTSI, Jo Ellison was features editor at British Vogue, which means that throughout her career she’s had a front-row view of the fashion industry’s love of thinness. In recent years, fashion began to embrace more diversity in body shapes and sizes. But with the rise of Ozempic and other GLP-1 weight-loss drugs, Jo is seeing the industry fear fat again. She worries that as Ozempic becomes more mainstream, fashion will come full circle, back to placing a premium on rail-thin bodies and judging those who don’t conform. Today, she talks about what this could mean for beauty standards, and how it may trickle down to the rest of us.
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We love hearing from you. Lilah is on Instagram @lilahrap, and email at [email protected]. And we’re grateful for reviews on Apple and Spotify!
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Links (all FT links get you past the paywall):
– Jo’s column about the silence around weight loss in fashion is here: https://on.ft.com/3ZWoDDq
– Check out our colleague Brooke Masters’ recent column on how GLP-1 drugs are changing gym regimens and food industry planning: https://on.ft.com/4050Cdl
– Jo is on Instagram @jellison22
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Original music by Metaphor Music. Mixing and sound design by Breen Turner and Sam Giovinco. Clips this week courtesy of Capitol.
Read a transcript of this episode on FT.com
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to Life and Art from FT Weekend. I'm Lila Raptopoulos. My colleague Joe Ellison has been around the fashion world for years. She was the features editor at British Vogue and the fashion editor here at the FT. She's now editor of our luxury magazine, HTSI. And that means she's sat at many fashion shows during many fashion months and knows |
| 0:22.7 | intimately just how much this industry hates fat. |
| 0:26.6 | Thinness has been the goal in fashion for as long as anyone can remember. |
| 0:30.0 | It's the goal for supermodels, of course, but for editors and stylists too. |
| 0:34.6 | What Joe noticed during this fall's fashion month, though, is that her colleagues didn't just |
| 0:38.7 | want to be thin. They were thin. And no one was talking openly about why. Joe wrote a column about |
| 0:44.3 | this recently, suspecting that these colleagues are mostly secretly on O-Zempic or we govy, |
| 0:50.1 | a tool used to fight diabetes and obesity, which is also now being used by people to shed a few pounds. |
| 0:55.6 | She thinks the fact that we're struggling with how to talk about this speaks to how we think about |
| 1:00.0 | bodies more broadly. So she's joining me today from London to talk about it. |
| 1:04.3 | Hi, Joe. Thanks for being here. Hi, nice to be here. |
| 1:07.6 | So let's just start with what happened. You're just back from a marathon fashion month. |
| 1:13.2 | What did you see? What did you hear? What made you want to write about this? I think it was just a general |
| 1:18.4 | trend I noticed, both on the catwalk and off it, that people are getting smaller. People that I've |
| 1:25.2 | known for, you know, more than a decade, people that I've kind of sat |
| 1:29.3 | next to and worked with. I mean, I'm not saying, like, every single person I know before anyone |
| 1:33.0 | thinks I'm about to name and shame, all these people who haven't done it. But there's just a definite, |
| 1:37.4 | like, there was definite slimming down of certain individuals that looked sort of shocking, or like |
| 1:43.6 | a very significantly noticeable amounts of weight loss, |
| 1:47.1 | which you can't help but sort of assume is attributable to something other than their exercise regime |
| 1:52.3 | because you've known them 10 years and you know they do a lot of exercise and it hasn't thus far been that significant. |
| 1:58.7 | But I then think that on another level, there's obviously a huge |
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