They store it in the fridge, next to the bottle of Krug, and pull it out a month or two before awards season, Fashion Week, the Met Ball, and the destination wedding on Harbour Island.
Maybe they just had a baby and are eager to lose the weight before hosting a party at Chateau Marmont. Maybe, after an ugly breakup last year, they dropped 10 pounds without trying, looked at the pictures of their abs that they posted over and over on Instagram, then decided not to gain it back. Maybe they want to borrow a sample from Chanel instead of shelling out $8,000, more or less, for something to wear to the Frick or Save Venice benefit. Their goal is to be fashion-thin, even though they know how wrong that sounds, how wrong it is, how twisted this whole weight issue has become.
Ozempic, Wegovy, Mounjaro, and other semaglutide drugs are being injected by those who, by all appearances, have no reason to get anywhere near them. One friend who works in fashion clocks the rise of these drugs among people who are, by every definition, thin. “I know two people who were going on it and off it the way they used to do a juice cleanse,” she tells me. She directs me to several Instagram accounts where the bodies in question seem to have narrowed, the waists grown more defined, the dresses more revealing, with deep cutouts at the torso.
I get it. I’ve gone to dumb extremes for a mere 10 pounds that no doctor advised me to lose. I used to do juice cleanses, until I realized that, with the rebound weight gain, they weren’t worth the trouble. In the 90s, I visited a doctor in a brownstone near Bloomingdale’s, where I’d bump into designers and social fixtures in the rickety elevator. The doctor handed out a typewritten meal plan that looked like a relic of the 50s: black coffee for breakfast; cottage cheese for lunch; broiled, skinless chicken breasts—that kind of thing. But no one went to him for that dusty old diet. We showed up for B12 injections and the pills he handed out like Halloween candy. Those pills turned out to be phentermine. They made me wild-eyed and jittery, but I lost 10 pounds in a flash.
And still, that doctor, not exactly a poster child for bedside manners, told me, “You can be thin, but you’ll never be fashion-thin.” How right he was.
Another doctor used to make cassette tapes for me. He would chant in a hypnotic voice, “Nothing tastes better than thin” and “You’ve come too far to take orders from a french fry” and “Would you rather eat Italian or wear Italian?” I’d pop in the tapes before bed, hoping the message would seep into my subconscious.
In other words, I understand why people want to stop working so hard to force their bodies to conform to an unrealistic shape. Some leave that life behind and accept the subsequent pounds as a healthy part of adulthood. Others aren’t so evolved. “I’m very pro-Ozempic for the skinny people,” one fashion friend tells me. Most “spend about 90 percent of their waking hours thinking about their weight. And with Ozempic, they get their minds back.... They’re in control without the self-loathing.”
We showed up for B12 injections and the pills he handed out like Halloween candy. Those pills turned out to be phentermine.
Please feel free to get out your Ozempically shrunken violin for these sylphs—the social X-rays of Tom Wolfe’s The Bonfire of the Vanities—and the way they suffer and suffer and relentlessly suffer to squeeze into designer samples. Some of them—the actors, the influencers, the models, who no longer have the metabolism of a racehorse—consider their bodies to be a business. “They fit into samples and want to look like models to get brand deals,” says the fashion friend, referring to a contract with a designer label or a sponsorship on social media. Maybe. But this could also be a convenient justification for disordered behavior.
Another woman in her early 30s is vocal in her support of semaglutides … to an extent. She—plus everyone else I spoke to—doesn’t want to be quoted by name. To lose weight before her wedding, she also transformed into a calorie-monitoring monster. One friend had to sit her down and tell her to snap out of it: “‘You’re not eating, you’re not drinking, you’re angry all the time,’ she said. ‘No one wants to hang out with you anymore.’” Two years ago, after she’d had a baby, this woman started taking Ozempic. “I actually enjoy my life now,” she says, sounding like a testimonial. “My life isn’t surrounded with having to diet and exercise.... I think Ozempic is a miracle drug.”
I run into a pal at a cocktail party, and practically the first words out of her mouth are “I’m on Ozempic.” She says the drug has given her so much comfort in her skin that she bought stock in Novo Nordisk, which makes Ozempic and Wegovy and has become the most highly valued company in Europe. “How’s the stock price?” I ask. “I haven’t even looked.” (She doesn’t need to; it’s up nearly 50 percent in the past year.)
“I’m very pro-Ozempic for the skinny people. Most of them spend about 90 percent of their waking hours thinking about their weight. And with Ozempic, they get their minds back. They’re in control without the self-loathing.”
For decades, Charles Passler catered to the fashion crowd. A chiropractor by training, he shifted to diet counseling and gathered a long list of devotees, including Carolyn Murphy, Narciso Rodriguez, Adriana Lima, and Bella Hadid. His program, a 21-day detox called Pure Change, centers around thimbles of smoothies, crumbs of protein bars, and bowls of steam. (I exaggerate, but only a little.)
Lately, though, he’s been working with a team of doctors to provide his clients with semaglutide prescriptions. “I don’t want to discriminate against individuals who only need to lose 10 pounds because they want to maximize their health,” he tells me. “Everybody who wants to be healthy should have the opportunity to engage in the treatment.”
But can model-thin actually be described as healthy? “When you’re looking at the person that only needs to lose, let’s say, 10 or 15 pounds, the benefit is overall better health,” he says. “But we have very strict parameters to make sure nobody ever gets too skinny. Even the models, I’ll be like, ‘No, if you want to lose more weight, I’m not the place to do it.’”
He’s been noticing a turn to micro-dosing the medication—something my cocktail-party friend does. “There’s a lot of signs out there that say a micro-dose of this medication is incredibly beneficial for people,” says Passler. “They feel better. It gives them a little bit of a buffer when it comes to blood-sugar management. And it does control ghrelin,” he says, which is the hunger hormone.
Wouldn’t you know, now that the fashion elite have their appetites in check, food has become a hot accessory. It might be coincidental that the artist Laila Gohar and her food sculptures are flourishing. Her baguettes wear black satin sheaths, the sausages are tucked into white gloves, and bulbous cheeses are topped with lace-edged bonnets. They look too pretty to eat. Louis Vuitton just introduced what it calls the Sandwich Bag, made of leather that’s folded over to resemble a lunch sack. They’re joking, right? Fashion people don’t eat sandwiches, and they don’t carry their sandwiches to work. Still, the bag is mouthwatering.
Olivier Cheng, whose firm has catered the Met Gala, is on the lookout for how this drug might alter his output. “I did an event the other day, and a lot of the food wasn’t eaten,” he tells me. “No one’s saying to me, ‘I’m going to have 200 guests; let’s make 50 meals at 50 percent.’” At a party last November, he remembers, “a lot of people wouldn’t sit for the main course,” and he wonders if the reason was a drug-induced disinterest. “Will we see a situation where the classic seated dinner isn’t done?” he asks.
But the people who use and prescribe these drugs are worried about a different future. That is: What happens when people go off the drug? Do the pounds come roaring back until people balloon to the size of an actual normal human? One solution, the result of clinical studies by scientists at the University of Auckland, might be a plant-based, over-the-counter supplement called Calocurb. Made from a particular variety of bitter hops, it reduces cravings by 40 percent. It has also shown an 18 percent reduction in calorie intake among users, says Sarah Kennedy, who later bought the rights to commercialize the substance and is the founder and C.E.O. of Calocurb.
It sounds hard to believe, and yet I read the research, which was funded by the New Zealand government. The supplement, taken one hour before a meal, stimulates the release of the body’s endogenous, internal appetite inhibitors: GLP-1, CCK, and peptide YY. “You’ll eat,” Kennedy tells me. “But you just can’t eat as much.” It’s sold on Amazon for $69.99.
Maybe we shouldn’t care so much about losing a little weight and fitting into our clothes. Diet culture is toxic; this we know. And yet we spend all our lives in our bodies, and their pure, corporeal existence is impossible to ignore. Even if we’re supposed to be more enlightened. “Guess what?” says one of the women I spoke with. “Our world is fat-phobic. And fashion is especially. This drug? It is fucking major.”
Linda Wells is the Editor at Air Mail Look