‘Please don’t lose another pound!’: Ozempic is upending the wedding dress industry
The ubiquity of GLP-1s is wreaking new havoc on bridal designers who must scramble to accommodate rapid weight loss
In bridal stores across the world, solicitous sales assistants are being trained to ask a new, blunt question: “Are you planning on losing a drastic amount of weight?”
Wedding season’s new disruptor is semaglutide, now used by 10% of engaged couples, according to a survey by the wedding planning platform Zola. In the same survey, 42% of couples said the ubiquity of GLP-1s has made them feel they should “look a certain way” for their wedding
GLP-1 weight loss is not limited to women, but bridal designers are feeling the impact most keenly. Traditional wedding gowns are complex, expensive garments. In her 16 years as a wedding dress designer, saysRebecca Schoneveld, who runs a “purposefully size inclusive” business, a lot of brides would tell her: “‘I’m trying on the dress now, but I’m hoping to lose weight’ – and in the past, actually, that would not happen. Or they would lose an inch or three inches.” The difference in the past year or two is that “the weight loss has been dramatic”.
Historically, says Kelly Cook, CEO of David’s Bridal, which has about 200 US stores, the wedding planning timeline was about 18 months, with the bride choosing her dress “in month four, five or six”. At the end of last year, Cook noticed a “significant shift”. Many brides were coming in early to try on dresses, asking anxious questions about weight loss and alterations, but they were “afraid to purchase it”, and, when they did, they did so months later
David’s Bridal responded by launching a fit guarantee, “which says no matter what the dress, we’re going to guarantee that it fits up until the wedding” – and if that means swapping for another dress, so be it, Cook says. David’s Bridal, which sells “roughly 2m units a year across all our categories”, many of which range from $500 to $2,000, can afford to offer such a service. For the small businesses creating fewer, intricate, bespoke gowns, such a guarantee would mean financial ruin.
Many stores are instead asking brides to givethema guarantee that they’ll pay for the dress whether it fits on the wedding day or not. Though some bridal designers have used similar contracts for years, they are becoming more widespread, and in some cases targeted for the Ozempic age. Jarithza Carlson, Atlanta-based domestic production director of US wedding dress designer Anne Barge, has updated contracts to say: “If you are planning to drastically lose weight, please let our retail team know. And, essentially, you may be required to purchase another gown if the dress is more than three dress sizes bigger” than the bride. Sales staff are also trained to bring the issue up early, aiming “to catch potential issues before gowns are even manufactured”.
When a dress is several sizes too big, says alterations specialist Melissa Lynn Oddo, it “may not be suited for alterations” – or alterations could easily cost $1,500, because “what we’re really doing is creating a custom piece, taking apart every single seam and proportioning it down”
Susan Ruddie, owner of the Baltimore and Brooklyn-based alterations specialists, The Wedding Dresser, used to tell brides that some weight loss would not be a problem: “Unless you lose 10 pounds from one breast, it’s not going to affect the overall fit.” This is no longer true. Recently, for example, “we had one bride who had lost so much weight, we needed to take her dress in more than 20in”. Schoneveld had a similar situation of a client who went from a bridal size 16 to a bridal size six in six months, and another who “wouldn’t admit that she was on medicine, and it was always our fault that the dress was too big”. Many more ask for tweaks to the design to accommodate post-weight-loss loose skin, says Ruddie, “so we lower the back into a V-shape, which hides the extra skin better than a straight strapless back; we have a whole variety of drapes and sleeves that go over people’s arms”.
Schoneveld says that corsets that lace up in the back, of the kind popular in the late 90s, have made a bit of a comeback in the semaglutide era, in part because “you have adjustability on the day” – though she also thinks the trend ties into a general tendency towards “more body manipulation” in fashion, aligning with a time when “skinny culture and cosmetic surgery is so much more normalized”
“Being in a bridal sitting room is like a therapy session,” says Schoneveld. “Working with so many brides over the years, there’s maybe one in 100 who doesn’t have negative thoughts about their body.” Broadly speaking, however, says Schoneveld, “my larger clients tend to have a much healthier mindset about their bodies – they’re accepting of themselves, whereas I notice my smaller clients struggle with: do I look perfect from every angle?”
Laura was prescribed a semaglutide compound for health reasons in early October 2024, a few weeks before she got engaged. “It was really medically driven – in the beginning.”
When she went dress shopping in December, she told the bridal shop: “I have no idea what I’m going to look like for the wedding, which was in September.” She had to sign waivers, the gist of which were: “We’ll do what you want, it’s against our advice, and you just have to sign extra paperwork saying that you’re taking responsibility for it.”
She lost 50lbs (22.6kg) between starting dress shopping and getting her dress, more than she expected, and she ended up having to contact the dress designer directly to get hold of a smaller size. She was relieved to learn that the dress had not gone into production and would order the size down, if she signed more paperwork
“It was nerve-racking,” she says. “I thought about it all the time. The production times are so long on a proper dress, it’s not like you can just hop out and grab something else – and it’s such a big, expensive purchase.”
She used ChatGPT to track her weight loss and measurements and predict what size she would be by the time the dress arrived. “The funny thing is, it nailed it. When I got the dress it needed zero alterations, aside from the hem.” In the months after that, though, she lost more weight. “At my last meeting with the seamstress, two or three weeks ahead of time, she was like, ‘Please, just don’t lose another pound. This is a strapless gown, it will start to fall off.’”
Though she wishes the timing had been different, Laura is evangelical about semaglutide: as has been anecdotally reported by many other users, she reports additional, unexpected benefits, including a reduction in longstanding spinal pain
As for her wedding day: “I can’t lie. Yes, I’m happier having pictures in the dress in the body that I’m in today than the body I was in two years ago,” she says. “But I do also feel that’s kind of a bummer, and I don’t think I would have tried [semaglutide] had it not been for all of the medical reasons.”
Not everyone is using GLP-1s for such dramatic weight loss. Currently only Wegovy and Zepbound-branded GLP1-s are FDA approved specifically for weight loss, usually for people with a BMI more than 30; many doctors caution against its use by those of a “normal” BMI. Still, “I’m seeing this with girls who are ordered a size six and then come in a size zero. It’s across the board for all sizes,” says Carlson
It’s the already slim brides, who use semaglutide to lose five or 10lbs, who New York City-based plastic surgeon Dr Darren Smith says he sees most often. Semaglutide has “transformed my patient mix”, he says. Before GLP1s, pre-wedding plastic surgery requests tended towards arm and chin liposuction. In the last two years, so many of the brides he sees have lost so much weight that lipo is moot. Instead, skin laxity procedures are booming and he is doing “a huge amount of small volume breast augmentations”, for brides who have “lost volume” in places they did not predict. Ideally this is something brides would do three months before their dress fitting, but he gets last-minute requests from Ozempic brides “all the time”. If they want to go ahead, he has to warn them that they will look as though they are wearing “an aggressive push up bra”. Generally, he believes, semaglutide use has further normalized cosmetic surgery. Many of those using it come to him saying: “Wow, I never thought I’d find myself in a plastic surgeon’s office.”
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Though there are still some lone voices crying out for wedding day body positivity (influencerMolly Scullion, for example, recently went viral for joyfully refusing to fixate on her weight in the run up to her wedding), semaglutides are being heavily marketed to brides of all sizes – in social media adverts fed to slim, wedding-planning women or by spas and wellness companies selling specific GLP-1 bridal packages. Pure Med Spa in Chicago, for example, offers a “tailored weight-loss and aesthetic treatment package” called Semaglutide for Brides. New York-based nutritionists Eat Shed Glow offer a comprehensive guide to “GLP-1 for Your Wedding”. In India, where Mounjaro is the country’s best-selling drug, New Delhi wellness clinic Klarity Skin Clinic offers packages for the “Mounjaro bride”. Already, says Schoneveld, some plus-sized brides she works with seem to feel they have to explain if they have chosen not to go on GLP1s. A future where all brides report similar feelings seems uncomfortably close.
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