In the Fitting Room Post-Ozempic
A few months ago, I ordered almost a dozen dresses for one party. I had recently lost about 15 percent of my body weight following an 18-month journey with Mounjaro, the diabetes and weight-loss medication. I was feeling physically better — walking longer stretches felt easier, my ankles were less swollen, I was sleeping better — and my clothes had gone from restrictive and sometimes uncomfortable to sitting just right. The idea of splurging on fashion was exhilarating. It felt like I was on the precipice of debuting a new look and a new body.
Not that I couldn’t pull together a look before. I rarely hated my closet or my mirror or my body when I was carrying more weight. But there were always clothes, a lot of them, that I yearned for: crisp button-down shirts, barrel-leg pants, fitted blazers, designer dresses that could have fit if the brand would just make my size.
This time around, I still went with brands that generally have extended sizing or some give in their cuts: Vince, Veronica Beard, Ganni, Norma Kamali, Amsale, Staud, and Mara Hoffman. I didn’t dare go to brands like Proenza, Versace, and Gucci — designer labels I fantasized about wearing but knew would never fit. (I’m still haunted by the time a Proenza sales clerk pulled a few things she thought might fit but not even the raffia slides would get comfortably on my feet, though I bought them anyway only to resell them on the RealReal.) I was used to inconsistent sizing, odd fits, clothes making their way over half my body but not the other, or shimmying into a dress only to find out it looked terrible — so I Googled photos to try to figure out what might work and ordered everything in both my “usual” size and one size smaller.
When the packages from SSENSE, Nordstrom, and Saks Fifth Avenue — thank you, lenient online return policies — all arrived, I laid each beautiful item out on my bed, obsessing over the small details, drunk off that high you get when you spend money you really shouldn’t have spent. I pulled out my top choice from the garment bag first: the Veronica Beard dress, a silky navy halter number with an empire waist. In pictures, it looked stretchy and like it would definitely fit, but in reality, the size 16 fit more like a 10. I couldn’t even get it over my shoulders, let alone over my breasts and onto my body. I was devastated. Next, a lime-green slip dress from Ganni, size 44. Ganni’s clothes usually fit, sometimes even running large, so I didn’t get the biggest size. I regretted it immediately. I got the dress on, but it lacked that flowy fit slip dresses should have. Instead, it creased in my stomach and I could barely walk in it. This wasn’t going well. I reached for the Staud — a pink pleated tank dress in stretch material — and got it on, but the drop waist was too tight and the fabric didn’t have enough give. It would never look good in pictures. The hair stood up on the back of my neck; I wanted to cry. I was sweating from jumping around trying to get into the clothes but also from the shame. After all that — endless research, doctor’s appointments, making the decision to go on the medication and white knuckling through the literally nauseating side effects — I still couldn’t find something I wanted to wear. Most of these designers had failed to make clothes that fit my body before, and while my body had changed, nothing else had. In the end, only two fit in a way I could wear outside: Vince and Mara Hoffman.
The minefield that is the fitting room, whether inside an actual store or just the space in front of your bathroom mirror, is familiar to most people. You walk into that room (or open that package), excited about the possibility of a new something to wear. The lights suddenly feel extra hot as you hurriedly pull off what you’re wearing to get yourself into whatever you’ve found that you’re sure will make you feel chic. But more often than not, it’s too big or too small, or you get it on but the proportions are all wrong, or you can’t walk or sit in it. The feeling that follows can be, without exaggeration, crushing. Enough to derail the rest of your day, leaving you feeling like there’s something wrong with your body.
After all that — endless research, doctor’s appointments, making the decision to go on the medication and white knuckling through the literally nauseating side effects — I still couldn’t find something I wanted to wear.
Lately, the stakes have felt even higher as more and more people are taking pharmaceuticals like Ozempic and Mounjaro and their bodies are changing. It doesn’t take much scrolling through the many online communities dedicated to GLP-1’s to find video after video of people talking about their changing relationship to both their bodies and clothing. “What they don’t tell you about them weight-loss shots,” a young man says in one TikTok, “is you get a point where you go in your closet and don’t shit fit.” In another, a woman shares how she lost 47 pounds on a GLP-1 and her daughter told her she needs new clothes; she knows she does, she tells her front-facing camera, but “shopping has always been frustrating” so she has been pushing it off. One woman, realizing she doesn’t need to be in the plus section anymore, films herself getting emotional as she browses a store. There are so, so many videos of women who’ve lost weight and then try on their old clothes, standing in front of the camera in disbelief, and an entire subgenre of TikTok in which people celebrate fitting into their old jeans. These are not svelte actors taking medication for a movie premiere but people who have long struggled to find clothes that fit their body who are now finding joy, confusion, and excitement in figuring out what their personal style is or are buying fast fashion in the interim while adjusting to their new body.
Katie, a 46-year-old media executive in New York City, used to feel like she had to wear a dress or “do the more feminine, nipped-in-waist kind of look” because she was always curvier. The waist-highlighting fit, she figured, was the most flattering “because I never really carried weight in my stomach.” But she always wanted to be able to wear straight-leg pants.
During the pandemic, Katie gained a significant amount of weight, going from a size 6 to a 14 in a short period of time, a side effect of perimenopausal hormone changes. She dreaded going back to the office because her work clothes no longer fit and “I just physically felt different than I’d ever felt in my entire life and not in a good way,” she says. “I looked puffy and swollen, and everything was uncomfortable.” So she went on Wegovy and later Zepbound, and the loss not only helped her feel more confident in her body but allowed her to be more experimental with clothes she previously couldn’t fit into. “I’m wearing belts, belted pants, for the first time ever,” she told me. “I love the look, the way it makes me feel.”
Recently, she attended a gala, and it was the first time she got to wear a suit, pairing Rag & Bone tuxedo pants with a backless suit top. She says the evening was a “turning point for her stylewise.”
“I’ve never gotten so many compliments,” she explains. “I was very self-conscious, so my friends hyped me up. But then strangers came up to tell me that they thought I had the best outfit there or that I looked hot. That never, ever happens to me.” She realized, “Oh, this is a style I can wear now.”
For writer and culture critic Soraya, getting dressed used to be about not getting noticed. “The last thing I wanted to do, because I was already in a bigger body and I already had low self-esteem, was to call more attention to myself,” she tells me. She shopped mostly at Eloquii, a plus-size brand known for its trendy basics. “I didn’t want to be noticed because I was anxious about being in any kind of spotlight, but I did love bright colors,” she adds.
Two years ago, Soraya’s endocrinologist decided it made sense for her to go on Ozempic for, as she puts it, “cancer-recurrence mitigation.” For Soraya, a breast-cancer survivor, holding extra weight elevated her estrogen levels, a risk factor for breast cancer. After a mastectomy and one year on the weight-loss drug, she fit into a size 12, a “straight” size, and found herself experimenting with more styles beyond the usual plus-size dresses and jumpsuits she’d been wearing.
“I definitely have a very femme personal style, but I always wanted to experiment,” she says. She loved brands like L’Wren Scott and Ralph Lauren’s women’s suiting and had always been drawn to “clothes that add feminine tailoring and details to menswear” but instead resigned herself to dresses that were more “forgiving.” Now, she says, she’s “comfortable taking more chances because there’s more in the store” in her size — brands like Rachel Comey, Acne, Tracy Reese, the Kooples, and Victoria Beckham.
Of course, losing weight and inhabiting a new body isn’t all roses. “There’ve been sort of surprising emotional land mines throughout the process,” Katie tells me. She recalls a time she put on those same Rag & Bone tuxedo pants a few months later and found the fit was different — they were baggy now and she would have to get them tailored. “It was confusing and sad, in addition to the excitement,” she says. “There were curves I would have preferred to keep that disappeared.”
The assumption is that we are all trying to lose weight and that when we lose weight, we will absolutely feel better in our clothes. But that’s not always true. Despite losing some weight, the shape of my body didn’t change much. I am still curvy and have wide hips and a round belly; I still had trouble fitting certain styles that weren’t made in my shape, specifically jeans. Even at my smallest, if I could get my body into a new pair, I felt like I’d accomplished something great, but when I couldn’t, I’d tell myself I had to go on a diet. One friend, who was taking Ozempic to address PCOS-related weight gain but had to go off it because her insurance won’t cover the costs, told me she still holds on to “some of my really thin clothes” she no longer fits. “Like this beautiful Prada dress that I still love,” she says. “I couldn’t bear to give them up completely.” She also keeps a stash of Ozempic in the fridge, leftovers from when she weaned herself off the drug once she realized she would lose access. She confesses to secretly wishing she could just take it all and supercharge her weight loss to wear those stored-away clothes: “I haven’t seen that version of myself in years, to be able to wear those clothes, to be that person.”
But the feeling of finally fitting into that outfit you long hoped you could but weren’t able to can be fleeting. Maybe it fits today but won’t tomorrow, maybe buying a new wardrobe is cost prohibitive, or maybe you’ll come off the medication and gain some weight back and then still be left with your old fashion choices or a uniform of black dresses. Or maybe, like me, you still don’t fit those dream clothes or you get them on but they still don’t look the way you’d hoped they would. Realizing that the goal is always shifting can be demoralizing.
In any case, letting go of who you were isn’t easy either. Where I was pre-medication, where I was post-medication, and where I am today are all different places. For Katie, getting rid of some clothes from when her body was larger has been easy, but with the pieces she really loved, like a pair of leather pants, some AG jeans, and a few dresses, it’s been harder. “Who knows what’s going to happen?” she says. “I don’t want to plan for this to be my body for the next 20 years because this is going to be the time probably when my body would naturally be changing the most anyway.” Research also suggests that most people don’t stay on these medications long term and that when they go off it, their bodies often change again.
I’d always had fun with fashion, but I thought a new world would open up for me after I lost weight. It did and it didn’t. I eventually found the perfect dress for my party: a sea-foam-green dress with cutouts from Abercrombie & Fitch’s plus collection. When I put it on, I loved how it looked, how it lay on my body, and how free I felt in it.
But it was jarring to have put so much work into self-acceptance, years of getting comfortable with having gained weight and finding clothes I felt good in, and months of agonizing over the decision to take a weight-loss medication only to feel a crushing sense of defeat when those other dresses didn’t fit. These weight-loss drugs have promised a miracle — to finally free us from the vicious cycle of dieting and weight fluctuations — and for good this time. To finally feel like who we are meant to be in our bodies. But the reality is much more complicated and much less instantaneous. We remain stuck in a cycle of loving ourselves as we are on the outside while locking away the often gutting experiences we have in private, at home and in dressing rooms, that profoundly impact our ability to truly embrace ourselves as we are. Breaking that mind-set is often too big a task for even the most body-positive among us. Still, though, we try shopping again, hoping for different outcomes, because what other choice do we have?