The politics of measurements

Nine thousand looks, one hundred and ninety-eight shows, and one number looping through them all: 97.1 per cent.
That’s the share of so-called straight-size models, generally between a size 2 and 6, who walked the Spring/Summer 2026 runways, according to Vogue Business’s new inclusivity report. Fewer than one per cent were plus-size; roughly two per cent were mid-size. The report appears bathed in optimism, yet it reads like déjà vu. Fashion loves to quantify itself: percentages of progress, decimals of virtue. But numbers are not the language of transformation; they are the vocabulary of calibration.

The Arithmetic of Inclusion.

Every year, Vogue Business counts bodies. Its reports sound like an annual audit of conscience: a statistical justification that fashion is in evolution.

On paper, the numbers are supposed to make us feel good that inclusivity is working, that diversity has become de rigueur in the industry. But this year’s report reads less like proof and more like a confession. 97.1 per cent of models continue to be “straight size.”

That figure hasn’t budged much since 2019. If anything, it’s solidified. The margins, the mid-size, and the plus-size are still only a few tenths away from visibility.

Growth here is not evolution; it’s a form of repetition. The industry continues to celebrate fractional movement as a moral victory, confusing representation for revolution.

Once inclusion is something to count, it’s no longer something to build. And fashion, with its endless appetite for proof, turned inclusion into arithmetic.

The Average Body

At stake behind these decimals is this unspoken fantasy: that there can be an average body: quantifiable, reproducible, utopian. It’s an illusion that arises not out of design but production. The modern sizing chart is not about people; it’s about efficient calculus.

Uniformity was needed in factories, so it was designed. That logic still holds on the runway today. Clothing is made for the body that fits the pattern, not the one wearing it. It’s everything else that gets altered, the real, the plural, the unpredictable.

The words we use today sound open and upstanding, straight, mid, plus speak the language of correction. But they have instead become its new architecture. They say difference, and that preserves hierarchy.

“Straight” is still the invisible centre, “mid” the buffer, “plus” what’s on the other side of the line. Fashion does not operate without a centre. It keeps remapping its own exclusion, in gentler terms.

But no body is average. Bodies change, every day, every hour, over the course of a life. They grow, shrink, and change form according to circumstance. The graph refuses to acknowledge that. The fantasy of the average body, that’s the real fiction in fashion.

The Politics of Visibility

What does it mean to have inclusion quantified? When it’s a percentage, not a principle?

A show can be 97 per cent exclusionary and still be considered inclusive because 3 per cent has become the benchmark of morality.

We are in a time of visibility that is, as such, quantifiable and manageable. Diversity statistics are announced by brands the way corporations announce sustainability pledges.

Representation becomes PR, not structure. Instead of transformation, we get token reform, a few more faces here, a symbol there, enough to look progressive, never enough to change the pattern. It is the new theatre of virtue.

It’s not that the designers don’t care; it’s that the system rewards what can be counted. We’ve turned progress into something that is just a visual performance, a choreography of good intentions sewn up in the identical silhouette.

Beyond Measurement

The fixation on quantifiability isn’t simply a fashion fad; it’s cultural. We tally everything nowadays: steps, calories, likes, followers.

We quantify our lives into evidence, convinced that what we can measure, we can improve. Fashion’s size reports are merely another iteration of this impulse, the moralisation of metrics.

But what of the loss that occurs when we define our values through data? When it is an image that is sought, profundity vanishes. The faith of the industry in numbers reflects our greater loathing of uncertainty.

We prefer statistics to sensorial and precision to perception. We like the clean symmetry of data to the mess of differences.

It’s simpler to believe 97.1% than it is to acknowledge what we still don’t know about how fashion, or any society, can truly be plural. But we keep acting like measuring progress is equivalent to achieving it.

The Tyranny of the Average

The problem isn’t that we measure too little, but that we measure the wrong thing. We keep counting bodies when we should be questioning beliefs.

That diversity is an enlargement of sameness. Adding a size isn’t the same as changing a system. Averages make us feel safe, a sense of order, and an imaginary fairness. But averages don’t change the world. They stabilise it. What they are saying is that difference can be controlled, plurality can be kept in check.

Fashion’s true crisis isn’t an aesthetic one; it is an imaginative one. It is incapable of visualising a world without averages.

Toward Imagination

The future of fashion will not be about new sizes, but about new ways of seeing. Inclusion isn’t going to come from bigger charts, and instead it will happen when we put the charts down. Real diversity is not a spectrum; it’s a state of mind. It begins where measurement leaves off, where calibration gives two cunning measurements to the imagination.

Imagine a system that doesn’t categorise but collaborates with the body: clothes that adjust, move, respond to time and change. Imagine designers who see variability not as error but as essence.

That would be a fashion that demanded we unlearn what made the industry in the first place. It would involve high artistic, financial and political risks. But it would also return fashion to what it had always been intended to be: a language of becoming, not of fitting in.

The Last Measurement 

The Vogue Business report is expected again next year. The decimals may slip; they always do. But until the system ceases chasing the average, each new percentage will be another rendering of the same story. Averages don’t change the world; what does is imagination. And imagination has no size.