This is an edited excerpt of my conversation with Lauren Chan for the Back Row podcast. You can watch or listen to the full episode on YouTube, Spotify, or Apple Podcasts. Follow the show so you don’t miss new episodes. If you like the pod, please leave a rating and a review, which takes ten seconds and really helps other people find this independent show.
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In the middle of the spring 2026 season, model and writer Lauren Chan received an Instagram DM from a stylist friend.
This person wanted to know if she had clothing in her personal wardrobe to lend for a photo shoot for the cover of a well-known entertainment magazine. The stylist was dressing someone who wore a similar size to Chan, probably a 12 or 14, and was messaging as a last-ditch attempt. “It sounds like she had reached out to PR in order to have samples shipped for this talent. They said yes, they shipped them, but when she opened the packages, they were size zero to four,” Chan said on this week’s episode of the Back Row podcast.
As she wrote in Who What Wear, she thought the stylist was joking at first: “Borrow my mass-produced, un-dry-cleaned Ester Manas and Ottolinger while the other cover stars will surely be dressed in designers' fresh-off-the-runway, one-of-a-kind samples?”
But Chan had seen this movie before. She started modeling as a way to get a work visa to come to the U.S. from her native Canada in hopes of starting a journalism career more than a decade ago. In the 2010s, she and I worked together at Cosmopolitan, where she covered size inclusion in fashion. She went on to work as fashion features editor at Glamour; launch the fashion brand Henning, which she sold to Universal Standard in 2023; and become the first lesbian cover model of the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue.
With couture week and fashion month coming up, I know we’re going hear discussion about “what happened to size diversity on the runways?” Fashion has never been all that inclusive, but body diversity had become a bit more apparent in recent years. However, any progress made in that area seemed to reverse over the last year or so with the rise of Ozempic. Vogue Business tallied up spring 2026 runway models by size, and reported, “Of the 9,038 looks presented across 198 shows and presentations, 97.1 per cent were straight-size (US 0-4), 2 per cent were mid-size (US 6-12) and 0.9 per cent were plus-size (US 14+).”
Chan has been an advocate on this issue for a long time and has seen A LOT in her decade-plus modeling, so I wanted to get her take on how she sees the current moment in fashion.
You wrote that great piece for Who What Wear about a stylist asking you to borrow your personal clothes for talent for an entertainment magazine cover shoot. I know you said it’s a common story, but I was surprised.
I can pretty much guarantee that the other talent weren't struggling with that problem. This is an age old tale — the talent who shows up who aren't sample size are completely at a disadvantage when it comes to getting dressed for press.
It can sound like a sob story for somebody famous who's getting shot for the cover of a magazine — “boo hoo, who cares, woe is you.” But that means this person is going to end up on this cover with their straighter sized peers. And those peers are going to be in current season designer collection, perhaps with ambassadorships or talks of ambassadorships, which means money, which also means prestige. And that's going to lead to other acting roles or advertising [work]. And then that means that they have more representation in the public sphere and we're creating a bigger gap between who's valued.
It starts at body size and it's still happening.
I didn’t realize before we talked today that modeling was a means for you to get a media job.
I very, very much disliked being a model. I disliked having no voice. I disliked participating in keeping plus-size over here and keeping fashion over here. But I'm so grateful because it really gave me my voice and my niche that I would later take to publishing, which is fashion with a focus on size inclusion.
(Photo by Hayley Kosan, courtesy of Lauren Chan.)
Talk more about what you didn’t like about modeling.
I used to have to pad when I was starting out. It's not really a thing anymore. They wanted people with body frames that would fill out size 14 clothing, but they wanted your face and your limbs to be more mid-sized. So you would bring your shapewear and pads and build out a body.
What I didn't like about it mostly was just the way that you have to work. You wait for people to book you. You tend to not have transparency into conversations that are happening between your agents and your clients. Then when you get the job, you just have to do whatever they want without input.
In some ways that's nice. I can now dissociate and [think], It's above your pay grade, babe. It's not your brand. Just have fun enjoy your time with these people. It took me years to do that because I would be in there and I would be like, That doesn't go with that, or, Those pants aren't fitting correctly and the customer's not going to buy them and keep them.
The clients will go, “Do you like the pictures?” [I say,] “That's above my pay grade. Do you like them? Great. Hope to see you again soon.”
Where would you buy pads like that?
Back in the day, your agency would get them for you and bill them to your account because there was no Amazon. It was probably a few hundred bucks. I don't know where they got them. Nowadays, you can go to Skims and buy shapewear with hip pads and butt pads. That’s one of those things I’m talking about where you don't have control.
Do you think the way models are treated in fashion in general has improved? If something's not handled well, thanks to social media, we can find out about it a lot more easily. It’s become normal around fashion week to see models talking about, for instance, how they had to wait for hours in a staircase with no water for a casting.
I've experienced that and I left with my jaw on the floor texting both my agents and my friends. I was shocked [to see] this casting director flipping out on people in a hallway with no airflow, screaming at innocent young models. I think that because this happened to me when I was already in my thirties, I said, Fuck you in my head and left. But unfortunately young people don't have the ability to have that kind of attitude. They have to sit there. They have to take it.
But I've seen that one time in my whole career. I do think that with “straight size” models, that still happens. I think that when I am somewhere, they're allowing people who aren't size zero to four, so it's a more welcoming environment in the first place.
You wrote in your piece in Who What Where that we are in a recession of size inclusion. A recession implies that we were somewhere better before. Where were we before and where are we now?
I would say that around 2015-ish, largely the Black female community’s conversation about body positivity was being taken mainstream via individuals like Ashley Graham and Precious Lee and brands like Lane Bryant. Remember the Christian Siriano x Lane Bryant, Isabel Toledo x Lane Bryant, Prabal Gurung x Lane Bryant [collabs]? Those were huge, huge milestones.
The 2014 Isabel Toledo x Lane Bryant collab.
Brands started piling on. Some do it really well and authentically and some have completely co-opted the message of body positivity from women of size and women of color — like a girl who's a size six in underwear leaning over really far to show one role and be like, “body positive.”
That was probably peaking around 2018, 19. You had huge mass market brands, which is where most people in this country shop, like Loft, offering plus sizes. Banana Republic had a really robust plus size offering. Universal Standard was doing really well.
We were in a really good spot. Then covid hit and things suffered, both financially in the way that brands are able to invest in plus-size lines, and in terms of what sociologically we're trending towards in terms of body and beauty.
When you look at the runways lately, it feels like that period was a fever dream. I'm kind of like, Am I always going to be writing about this? I interviewed Virginia Sole-Smith, who writes a great newsletter called Burnt Toast (which is on Patreon now, formerly Substack) about this issue. And she said that when the fashion industry does embrace plus-size models, that's often a “small fat” person, which may not represent the average body — it's just a bigger body than the straight size models. She pointed out that if she goes into a Chanel store, she can't buy anything there.
She's so right. She sounds like somebody with a lot of intelligence and lived experience and who's able to communicate on a really high level. And those are the kinds of people that we have to listen to.
This problem really is responsible for a lot of awful shit about the fashion industry. The root of the problem is that a lot of fashion is run by older white men, so their ideas about women are apparent.
What is straight size and why is that the default in fashion? Why so tiny?
Straight size models are runway size models. So size zero to four, zero to two.
I think that the reason is often twofold. One, for runway samples, it is easier, more economical to design for a size that A, consumes less fabric, and B, when you're that small, a lot of the models’ bodies are going to have very similar proportions. So you're able to save so much time, energy, and money [fitting clothes].
And then I think the other part of that comes from how we think about beauty and fashion and what's being taught in schools as what's beautiful to the eye. The fashion sketches that kids at school learn to draw on are size zero. So from the jump, that's embedded.
Christian Siriano uses a handful of us plus-size models every single season. I see what the other girls wear on the runway and how it fits me versus them. You have to make them in sizes from about 10 to 16. Then they all require extra attention, tailoring to make it all look as top notch as he makes it look.
Do you think there is more diversity in fashion imagery in general today than before, say, 2015?
I do think that there is. I think that we see that across the board, beyond size — we see more people of color represented, we see different abilities represented. My other area of focus for advocacy is queer people, since I've come out. More than half of queer characters are disappearing from TV within the next year, according to GLAAD. In the first place, we made up a small sliver of everyone that appears on TV. So it's the same conversation we're having in fashion.
I think the chart of inclusion looks like the stock market. The S&P, will always go up over time. But there are highs and lows along the way. And I think we're in a low right now.
Find the full interview with Lauren — including her thoughts on the Ozempic boom — on YouTube, Spotify, or Apple Podcasts. And follow Lauren on Instagram for even more.
Earlier in Back Row:
