Plus Size Assortments Are Shrinking Again

Extended sizes in women's apparel on Target's website fell about 37 percent between March 2025 and March 2026, with roughly 30 percentage points of that decline coming in just the last six months. Old Navy's extended size options fell about 12 percent over the same period. Torrid, a retailer built specifically around plus size customers, said last month it would close about 180 of its roughly 630 stores this year.

A new reason, an old pattern

Industry coverage increasingly points to GLP 1 weight loss drugs as a factor behind the pullback, with plus size shoppers telling reporters they worry the drugs are fueling a return to thinner sizing across the industry. Retailers have also cited softer sales in extended sizes as demand shifts. Whatever the immediate cause, the pattern itself is not new: extended sizing has expanded and contracted in cycles before, often tracking a retailer's broader margin pressure more closely than it tracks any single cultural moment.

Torrid's own plan for 2026 illustrates the tension. The company says it is moving toward what it calls a more strategically balanced assortment, with about 30 percent of its offering shifted toward opening price points, even as it reduces its physical footprint and leans further into online sales, where it says 70 percent of its customers already shop.

Who tends to survive the cycle

Analysts who track the category make a consistent distinction: brands that built extended sizing into core supply chain and merchandising decisions from the start have weathered these cycles better than brands that added a plus line as a marketing campaign and then quietly scaled it back once demand or inventory got harder to forecast. That distinction has mattered before at Old Navy specifically, where a widely publicized 2021 push into extended sizing was followed within a year by public acknowledgment of an inventory imbalance in that same category. A separate dispute over how that specific imbalance was resolved, involving a distributor called SVES, is covered in this publication's ongoing investigation.