CNN
 — 

Now that the Fall-Winter 2023 catwalks have been disassembled, it’s clear one trend was more pervasive than any collective penchant for ruffles, pleated skirts or tailored coats.

Across runways in New York, London, Milan and Paris, there was a notable scarcity of plus-size models. This comes at a time when there are five injectable medications which can be used as appetite suppressants currently available by prescription in the US, stirring much conversation; a sixth medication, Rybelsus, is taken as an oral pill. Two are officially approved in the UK — the largest influx of weight loss medication seen in the country in almost a decade.

In recent months, injectables such as Wegovy and Ozempic — which share the same active ingredient, semaglutide — have been widely reported as Hollywood’s worst-kept weight loss secret. (Ozempic is intended for use primarily to treat Type 2 diabetes.) Comedian Chelsea Handler claimed her “anti-aging doctor just hands (Ozempic) out to anybody” while appearing on a podcast in January. Even Elon Musk tweeted last year about being on Wegovy.

For many fashion commentators and diversity advocates, the Fall-Winter 2023 runways were in sharp contrast to the (albeit limited) progress and heady promise of recent seasons. This rollback has been widely criticized in the style media as such. And its potential impact is being assessed more broadly: With the rise of these weight loss panaceas, the pursuit of size zero is now just a prescription away.

In 2020, Jill Kortleve and Paloma Elsesser became the first models outside of a sample size to walk for the Italian fashion house Fendi. (Traditionally, a sample size falls between a US 0-4.) British label Erdem entered the plus-size market in 2021, extending its offering to a UK size 22 (or US size 18). And in January 2022, Valentino made headlines after its haute couture show featured a broad spectrum of body types. But this season, there was a visible lack of curve bodies on their runways — or many others.

Fendi and Valentino did not respond when contacted by CNN, while Erdem declined to comment.

According to fashion search engine Tagwalk, the number of mid and plus-size models dropped by 24% in comparison to Spring-Summer 2023. Similarly, a size inclusivity report conducted by Vogue Business found that 95.6% of all looks presented for Fall-Winter 2023 were in a size US 0-4. For context, industry market firm Plunkett Research estimated in 2015 that 68% of American women wear a size US 14 or above.

“It was a definitive backslide,” said IMG model agent Mina White, who represents plus-size and curve supermodels including Elsesser and Ashley Graham. “It was frustrating to see some of these designers not using curved bodies where they had in the past.” Fendi and Valentino did not respond when contacted by CNN, while Erdem declined to comment.

“Watching somebody like Ashley Graham attend the front row for so many of these major houses in full looks (provided by the designer), it was frustrating,” White continued. “They wanted to utilize her image and her social following to command a certain space in the market, but they didn’t want to be reflective on their runways.”

For others, even the term “backslide” was too generous. “Slipping back from… what? A glorious time when the average American woman (size 16) was as present on the runways as she is in everyday life? A time when fashion ads cast as many ‘plus-size’ and ‘mid-size’ women as ‘straight-size’ women?” fashion journalist Amy Odell wrote in her Substack newsletter of this past season’s runways. “No one needed any data to understand that representing a wide array of body shapes and sizes in runway shows or in fashion imagery is not a priority for the industry.”

That said, a handful of — mostly smaller — brands pushed ahead this season. In London, emerging labels Di Petsa, Karoline Vitto and Sinead O’Dwyer showcased lineups of size-diverse models. Inclusivity at Christian Siriano, Coach, Kim Shui, Collina Strada and Bach Mai stood out in New York; while in Paris, Belgian brand Esther Manas — a consistent flag-bearer for size diversity — staged one of the city’s most refreshing runways with an assortment of fun, sensual, feminine looks that complimented a range of bodies.

There was also a smattering of mid- and plus-size castings to be seen elsewhere: Off-White and Michael Kors, for example, featured a few such models. At Harris Reed’s debut for Nina Ricci, Precious Lee opened the show — which also featured three more plus- and mid-size models.

Fashion samples and sample size pieces are one-off garments made before an item is mass-produced, typically to be worn during runway shows. Prioritizing the same body type in sample sizes means runway models are more easily interchangeable, saving fashion houses time and money if someone were to drop out or get sick during or after the casting process for a show.

It’s also partly why, according to White, casting curve models is still an uphill battle. She says she introduces brands to new faces months in advance of runway season, with their specific measurements up-top and easy to read in all correspondence. “I want to be ahead of that,” White said. “So I’m never told ‘Oh, we wanted to make it work, but we didn’t have her size’ or whatever that conversation might look like.”

But despite her efforts, she says she’s frequently told it’s too much of a “financial lift” to make larger samples — even by legacy brands. “I get very upset when brands say that,” White said. “I don’t believe that it is, I believe that it’s people not being properly educated on how to do this right.”

Beyond the lack of representation, White notes it’s painful for plus-size consumers to watch brands leverage resources to create custom, made-to-fit pieces for celebrities — all the while claiming the pot is empty for more inclusive runway samples.

London-based stylist and editor Francesca Burns agrees sample sizes are part of the problem. In 2020, Burns went viral after she posted on Instagram about a fashion job gone wrong. She says she was sent five looks to style from Celine, none of which fit the size UK 8 (US 4) model booked for the shoot— an 18-year-old on her first job in the business. The experience left her “horrified,” Burns told CNN, recalling what she saw as the model’s shame and embarrassment. “Looking into this girl’s eyes,” Burns said, “she shouldn’t have felt like that.”

Burns’ post, which called the current system “unacceptable,” was picked up widely in the fashion media. (When reached by CNN, Celine declined to comment on the incident.) “Ultimately, the desire to see change has to be there,” Burns said. “And I wonder whether luxury has that desire?”

Progress has been slow, but not entirely inexistent. Across fashion campaigns, magazine covers and editorial shoots, there is a growing enthusiasm for inclusivity. “I see the options rolling in for the plus-sized talent, and they’re great offerings,” said White. “Great, strong editorials and covers and campaigns. But I do feel like without the clothes, we are going to go back to see more naked curve stories, or lingerie curve stories or a curve girl in a trench coat. That’s what I don’t want.”

For British Vogue’s April issue, unveiled March 16, Elsesser, Lee and Jill Kortleve were dubbed “The New Supers.” Preceding the cover story is a letter written by editor-in-chief, Edward Enninful commending the models for “leading the way” and holding “powerful space” in the industry.

“Catwalks are once again under scrutiny for a stark lack of body diversity,” read the magazine’s Instagram caption, unveiling the cover. “But this cover was not conceived as a statement. It is a crowning of an all-powerful trio, the supermodels for a new generation.”

But many online were quick to point out the disconnect: Two of the Saint Laurent Spring-Summer 2023 dresses were modeled by plus-size women, though they are not available to buy in most plus sizes.

In his own social media post, Enninful wrote about his disappointment at the Fall-Winter 2023 runways. “I thought I had gotten into a time machine. Show after show dominated by one body type, so many limited visions of womanhood… one prescribed notion of beauty prevailed again, and it felt like the reality of so many women around the world were being ignored.”

But for White, the power rests within the entire industry — not just at the feet of brands. “I really do believe there should be an industry standard between the (Council of Fashion Designers of America), the British Fashion Council and key editors at some of these major mass market magazines,” she continued. “If there was a call-to-action from these figureheads saying, moving forward samples need to be readily available for a few different body types, we would see significant and impactful change.”

Burns agrees there must be a trickle-down effect. “I think a lot of responsibility is put on young designers to solve all these issues around sustainability or issues around body inclusivity,” she said. “It’s important that the big powerhouses, which have the capacity to action change, really take some responsibility.”

On March 8, Wegovy — developed primarily as a treatment for those living with obesity and weight-related conditions — was approved in the UK. It’s the second injectable weight management medication to be made available with a prescription via the country’s National Health Service (NHS) in about 3 years, after almost a decade of quiet. Before 2020, the last weight loss medication was approved in the UK was in 2010.

Similarly, the US has now approved three weight management injections: Wegovy, Saxenda and IMCIVREE. Medications for type-2 diabetes like Mounjaro and Ozempic are not FDA-approved for weight loss, though some doctors are issuing them at their own discretion.

While these medicines are a revolutionary tool for those who struggle to lose weight for genetic or medical reasons, they are at risk of being abused.

Semaglutide, the active ingredient in Wegovy and Ozempic, was originally developed for treating type-2 diabetes. It quells hunger signals to the brain by mimicking the hormone glucagon-like peptide-1 (GLP-1). “It can slow how quickly your stomach empties out and may give you a little more feeling of feeling full,” said Dr. Robert Lash, an endocrinologist and Chief Medical Officer of the Endocrine Society in Washington, D.C. In clinical trials, over a period of 68 weeks, participants who used the medication in conjunction with eating fewer calories and increasing their physical activity on average lost around 15% of their body weight compared to 2.4% of those using a placebo, according to the manufacturer Novo Nordisk.

On March 13, the European Medicines Agency issued a statement warning of an Ozempic shortage that could continue through the year, urging doctors to prioritize prescriptions to diabetics. “Any other use, including for weight management, represents off-label use and currently places the availability of Ozempic for the indicated population at risk,” read the release.

Patients typically need a BMI of 27 or higher (along with another weight-related condition like high blood pressure or diabetes) or have a genetic predisposition towards obesity to be prescribed such appetite suppressant medication by their doctor. But talk of these injectables has been sweeping the West. In January, the New York Times reported on the term “Ozempic Face,” coined by a New York-based dermatologist who reported treating several patients with a hollowed-out appearance that can come with rapid weight loss. By the end of February, the medication had made it to the cover of New York Magazine in a feature titled “Life After Food?” Adverts for GLP-1 injections are even blanketing New York City subway stations.

And across social media, online forums and private group chats, some people looking to lose weight for primarily aesthetic purposes are searching for a way to skirt the requirements.

“I was just looking for a way to lose a few pounds, like 10 to 15 at most,” said one 30-year-old American woman, who wished to remain anonymous, in a phone interview. She scoured social media and forums for guidance on securing a weight loss drug. “I’m certainly a normal BMI, I just have a trip to Mexico coming up and I want to look really good,” she said.

Although she says she found a way to access Wegovy, she decided against the medication after considering the cost (which can reach more than $1,000 a month without insurance). “I’ve always very much fit the societal standard but lately I was just like f*ck it, I want to be skinny,” she told CNN.

Dr. Lash emphasized the importance of taking weight loss drugs only with medical supervision and a valid prescription. “If somebody was a normal weight and they took this drug because they thought they could be even thinner than they are now, that could lead to complications,” he told CNN, warning of nausea, vomiting, diarrhea and even gallbladder problems. “These drugs are not benign, they do have side effects involving the GI tract. There’s no such thing as a free lunch.”

Every body is invited

Fashion has long promoted size 0 as the ultimate virtue — regardless of its viability for many people, or any health risks. And now with the accessibility of accelerated weight loss medication, the stakes are even higher. For Burns and White, the industry is responsible for amplifying a new, more inclusive vision of beauty.

“There’s a very archaic way of looking at women over a size 16 and just assuming that they’re unhealthy or uneducated or unstylish. Or don’t have the resources to buy into luxury,” said White. “The reality is the same women these brands are alienating in their fashion space are the same women running out to buy their handbags, shoes, perfumes, cosmetics and skincare.”

Not only do designers need to create clothes with this consumer in mind, according to White, but they need to be seen on the runway, too.

“It shouldn’t be a conversation. It should just be normalized that we’re not just looking at a single view of beauty,” echoed Burns.

Ester Manas and Balthazar Delepierre, whose bridal-inspired Fall-Winter 2023 collection was one of this season’s most size-diverse runways, summarized it best in their accompanying show notes: “The body is not the subject. Because, obviously, at a wedding, everybody is invited. And all to the party. That is where the designer duo Ester and Balthazar take their stand.”

CNN
 — 

Anthony Bourdain loved haggis. But even the late, great American chef, writer and television host recognized that Scotland’s national dish, with its “sinister sheep parts” wrapped in a shroud of mystery and half-invented history, could be a hard sell.

“Don’t let them tell you otherwise, that’s really one of life’s great pleasures,” Bourdain said on one of his gastro-curious pilgrimages to Glasgow. “There is no more unfairly reviled food on Earth than the haggis.”

A mash-up of diced lung, liver and heart mixed with oatmeal, beef suet, onion and assorted spices, haggis was traditionally made by stuffing these raw ingredients into the stomach of a recently slain sheep and boiling the lot to a state of palatability.

Instagrammable is not the word that immediately comes to mind. In our 21st-century world, where “clean” eating and processed pap overlap, haggis can seem like an “Outlander”-style outlier from another age.

Yet, by some alchemy, once cooked to its required “warm-reekin’ (steaming)” state, it adds up to much more than the sum of its modest parts. It’s offaly charm has kept nose-to-tail eating alive among a younger generation of Scots that has largely turned its back on the tripe, liver and kidneys their predecessors enjoyed (or endured).

Carefully prepared, haggis tastes both oaty and meaty; it is dark and crumbly, a little crispy at the edges but still moist; earthy but also savory and spicy; deep-tasting and profoundly warming, the perfect foil for its traditional garnish of floury mashed potatoes and orange bashed turnip.

“It’s like a cuddle for the stomach,” says Nicola Turner, a 35-year-old office administrator from Helensburgh, a town on western Scotland’s Firth of Clyde.

Spice and texture

For children of the 1960s and ’70s, like crime novelist Ian Rankin, haggis meals were a choice between the classic meat-and-two-veg plate and the battered and deep-fried, chip-shop iteration loved by both his friend Bourdain and his quintessentially Scottish detective character, Inspector John Rebus.

Now myriad other treatments have blossomed.

“I’m pretty sure the first time I dined with AB in Edinburgh we had haggis in filo pastry with a jam-style – maybe blackcurrant – sauce,” Rankin recalled. “He was a big fan of haggis and of chip shops. Rebus will have enjoyed the occasional haggis supper from his local chip shop. He was definitely a fan, as am I.”

“It is all about the spicing and the texture,” says the Scottish food writer, novelist and cook Sue Lawrence, a champion of haggis’ adaptability for use in other dishes. “If you didn’t know what was in it, you wouldn’t think ‘oh that tastes of liver or whatever.’ It is all nicely chopped up and the oatmeal gives it a lovely texture. It could easily be a nice, big mince dish.”

Lawrence uses haggis as an alternative to beef and pork ragù in lasagna and in her pastilla, a version of the North African dish in which a hand-made haggis from the Isle of Mull substitutes for the traditional poultry or seafood filling. The filo pastry savory is flavored with the spice blend ras el hanout, apricots, chile, orange zest and almonds before being sprinkled with cinnamon and icing sugar.

Such cultural crossovers serve as a reminder that haggis could easily be a dish with nothing specifically Scottish about it at all. Records of similar quick and portable preparations of the fast-perishing innards of sheep and other animals date back to ancient Rome and Greece.

Haggis-like combinations of offal and grains are part of the culinary history of several countries. Spain has chireta, Romania drob and Sweden polsa, while chaudin, or ponce, is a rice and meat-stuffed pig stomach that is a staple of Cajun cooking.

In neighboring England, recipes for “hagese,” “hagws of a schepe,” “haggas” or “haggus” pop up in recipe books published between the 15th and 17th centuries, probably preceding written records north of the border.

Etymological evidence points to the term “haggis” having its roots in Old Norse, suggesting an early version of an oat-and-offal sausage might have arrived in Britain and Ireland on a Viking longboat.

But ever since it was first optioned by the poet Robert Burns in the late 1700s, the haggis backstory has been monopolized by Scotland and the Scots, sometimes mischievously.

It is, according to the kind of lore that Burns engendered, the dish a doughty Highlander would carry with him as he drove cattle through the glens to the markets of the central belt or the perfect picnic for a whisky smuggler plying his illicit trade by moonlight.

From such romantic notions it was a short step to turning the haggis into a wee wild beastie, one with longer legs on one side that was thus condemned to run round and round whichever hill it lived on. In 2003, a poll of American tourists in Scotland found that one in three of them believed they might encounter such a confused creature on a Caledonian vacation.

Bourdain, a native New Yorker, may have qualified as haggis’ biggest admirer since Burns, but his compatriots at the US Department of Agriculture remain unconverted to offal-filled paunch. Haggis imports into the United States were prohibited in 1971 as part of a ban on the consumption of all livestock lungs. Authentic versions of old school haggis remain culinary contraband in the US, as hard to lay your hands on as Cuban cigars.

Across the rest of the world, it’s a different story. According to leading producer Simon Howie, haggis is more widely appreciated and consumed now than it has been since Burns improvised his “Address to a Haggis” for the entertainment of well-to-do Edinburgh acquaintances.

Firmly tongue-in-cheek, the poem lauds the “Great chieftain o’ the pudding race,” as exactly the kind of unpretentious, hearty fare required to nourish a nation of braveheart warriors.

In comparison to the enfeebling foreign muck enjoyed by the capital’s claret-quaffing elites of the time – the olio, fricassée or ragoût that would “sicken a sow” – Burns urges his readers to wonder at the magical impact of haggis on his fellow sons of Scotland’s soil.

As the English translation of the original Scots language version puts it:

But mark the Rustic, haggis-fed/

The trembling earth resounds his tread/

Clap in his ample fist a blade/

He’ll make it whistle/

And legs and arms and heads will cut/

Off like the heads of thistles

These days synthetic casings have largely replaced stomach but ovine and porcine innards remain at the core of most of the haggis produced in its homeland, said Howie, who estimates that his company Simon Howie Butchers, accounts for around 60% of the roughly two million haggises produced every year.

For Howie, versatility, value for money and convenience explain why this staple of the Scottish larder is thriving. Typically haggis retails in Scotland, which accounts for half of global consumption by volume, for around £6, or $7.70 per kilogram ($3.36/pound). That’s around half the price of less expensive cuts of beef or a third of the price of Scotch lamb while enjoying a fairly similar nutritional and calorific profile.

“You can give your kids a meal that is not full of things you don’t want to feed them – for a few pounds you can feed three strapping lads,” Howie said.

“From a kitchen perspective, it is very simple because when it leaves our factory it is already cooked. So when you or a restaurant owner gets it into the kitchen all you have to do is heat it up to be piping hot. It couldn’t be more basic: a student with no cooking skills or a Michelin-starred chef do exactly the same thing to put it out on the plate.”

Its texture means haggis can also be usefully deployed in fine dining alongside leaner meat like venison or as a stuffing for poultry and game birds. Its spicy intensity means it is also finding uses in canapés and as a crouton-borne garnish for soups.

Buoyant sales are also underpinned by the increasing consumption of haggis in forms inspired by Scotland’s ethnic minorities.

Glasgow’s Sikh community pioneered haggis pakora in the 1990s and samosas, spring rolls and quesadillas have followed in its wake, often using a vegetarian version of the protein in which the offal is replaced by a mix of vegetables, pulses and mushrooms.

Such dishes are more than culinary twists. They are badges of belonging, and an indication that, two centuries after Burns grabbed it for the nation, haggis is as intimately entwined with Scots identity as ever.

Just ask Ross O’Cinneide, a promising 14-year-old fly-half in the junior section of Stirling County rugby club.

“Most of my friends and I like haggis,” he says. “Mum makes it for us sometimes after rugby and it’s got a very nice warming feeling. And it’s nice because it’s purely Scottish.”