In March 2023, H&M announced that its women’s range would run from XL up to 4XL, and hired the model and activist Tess Holliday as a size and inclusivity consultant to get it there. Three years later the two largest sizes are gone. That is not a rumour from a shopping forum and not an inference from a trend piece. H&M confirmed it in a statement to the Guardian, which published it on 20 August 2026. We read that piece in full, and on 7 September 2026 we opened H&M’s own shop pages in the UK and in Germany to see what is actually on the rails. This article is about what a company says and what its website shows. It is not about anyone’s body, and it says nothing about why anyone’s clothes fit differently this year.
What H&M said
The Guardian asked H&M about the missing sizes. The company replied that it continually monitors fit and sizing demand and that it had “chosen to discontinue sizes 3XL and 4XL”, because it had seen lower demand for them. That sentence is the whole news. Everything else in this article is context for it.
Holliday, whose consultancy produced the expansion, no longer works with H&M. She told the Guardian she had been cautious going in, became optimistic when changes she asked for were actually made, and now doubts the commitment was as genuine as she had hoped.
What the data firm counted
The Guardian’s numbers come from Edited, a retail analytics company that records items as they appear on retailers’ websites. Edited looked at every new women’s dress that landed on H&M’s site between January and May 2026 and compared it with the same months of 2025. According to Edited, as reported by the Guardian:
- In 2025, sizes 3XL and 4XL made up 2 percent of the new dresses. In 2026, they were absent.
- XXL had been 13.3 percent of new dresses in 2025 and fell by 3 percentage points.
- XL fell by 2 percentage points.
- Sizes XS to L rose by 3 percentage points on average.
Edited’s raw data sit behind a paid platform. We have not seen them, and we are not building any number of our own from them. The figures above are Edited’s, as the Guardian describes them, and the method is Edited’s too: new items landing on the site in a fixed window, not the full catalogue, not stores.
The Guardian reports the same direction at two other brands. Mango’s new dresses in UK sizes 16 to 20 went from 6.6 percent of new inventory in spring/summer 2025 to 0.5 percent in spring/summer 2026, again according to Edited. At Anthropologie, plus-size dresses fell from 10.5 percent to 9 percent of the July range year on year. Walmart, Edited’s analyst told the paper, was a rare case of a retailer adding larger sizes this season.
What H&M’s own shop showed on 7 September 2026
Trade data describe what arrived in spring. We wanted to know what a customer sees today, so we opened H&M’s websites for the UK and for Germany, without logging in, and looked at the pages H&M itself files under plus sizes. H&M calls that range “H&M+”. Here is what we found, with the time and place of the check.
United Kingdom, hm.com, 7 September 2026:
- The general women’s “Dresses” category listed 1,339 products. Its size filter still offered 3XL and 4XL as options.
- The “Plus Size Dresses” category page inside H&M+ existed, with its navigation tabs and its marketing text intact, and listed no products at all.
- The whole H&M+ range for women listed 43 products.
- One basic cotton T-shirt in that range was still offered from XXS to 4XL.
Germany, hm.com, 7 September 2026:
- The “Übergrößen Kleider H&M+” page, the German plus-size dresses category, existed, with its tabs and text intact, and listed no products at all.
- The whole H&M+ range for women listed 31 products.
So the picture is not that the sizes have been deleted from the system. The filter buttons are there, a T-shirt still runs to 4XL, and the category pages still have their SEO copy about dresses for work and special occasions. What is missing is the dresses. In two of H&M’s largest European markets, the plus-size dress category is a shelf with a label on it and nothing on the shelf.
That is a snapshot, not a series. Stock moves daily, and a page that is empty on a Monday in September may not be empty in October. We give the date so that anyone can repeat the check, and we will repeat it ourselves.
The customers did not leave
H&M’s stated reason is lower demand. The Guardian’s piece puts two other kinds of number next to that claim, and we report them because they are numbers, not because they settle the question.
ThredUp, the online second-hand platform, told the Guardian that listings of larger garments rose 32 percent year on year in the first half of 2026 and that purchase volume for women’s items in sizes large, XL and plus grew 17.4 percent this year, against 6.8 percent for small and medium. A company whose business is second-hand has an interest in that story, and it says so itself: it has no data on why. But it is a measured number, and it points the other way from “lower demand”.
Mintel, a market research firm, told the paper that 69 percent of shoppers say brands need to offer more size and length options, and its retail analyst argued that the size curve may be shifting but that this does not remove the need for size inclusivity; the bigger problem, in her words, is fit. Plunkett Research estimated last year that about two thirds of US women wear a size 14 or above, which most brands file under plus.
Put those next to H&M’s sentence and you get the shape of the argument. The company says fewer people asked for 3XL and 4XL dresses at H&M. The second-hand market says more people are buying large sizes elsewhere. Both can be true at once, and the second is a plausible consequence of the first: you cannot buy a dress in a size that is not made, so you buy it used, or you stop looking. Holliday’s version of that, in the Guardian, is blunter: plus-size people are treated as less worthy customers. Nikki Apostolou, an influencer quoted in the same piece, said she has given up on malls entirely and that brands have spent years offering plus-size shoppers the same few shapes.
What we are not saying
We are not saying why H&M’s customers are the size they are, and we are not repeating the industry’s explanation for it, because that explanation is a claim about bodies and this is an article about a shop. Several analysts quoted by the Guardian attribute the shift to weight-loss drugs. We have no way to check that against H&M’s sales data, H&M did not say it, and we are not going to assert it. If the thesis is that the customer got smaller, that is the trade’s thesis, not ours.
We are also not saying that H&M is unusual. The Guardian lists Loft, Old Navy and Torrid as earlier retreats, and we have written about the same retreat on the runway this season. What is unusual here is the paper trail: a 2023 announcement, a named consultant, a data firm counting the result, and a company sentence confirming it. Most size cuts happen quietly. This one has a receipt.
If you need to know what that means in practice, the answer is the same as for any other space built to a smaller body: the problem is the space, not the person in it. A category page with no dresses on it is a design decision. It was made by a company, and the company has said so.
Sources
- Hannah Marriott, “Where did all the XXL clothes go? Fashion brands are scrapping plus sizes in the GLP-1 era”, The Guardian, 20 August 2026. https://www.theguardian.com/fashion/ng-interactive/2026/aug/20/plus-size-clothes-glp-1 (Edited, Mintel, ThredUp, Plunkett Research and Impact Analytics figures and all quotations are taken from this piece; Edited’s underlying data are proprietary and were not consulted directly.)
- H&M UK, Women’s Dresses, checked 7 September 2026: https://www2.hm.com/en_gb/ladies/shop-by-product/dresses.html
- H&M UK, Plus Size Dresses (H&M+), checked 7 September 2026: https://www2.hm.com/en_gb/ladies/shop-by-product/hm-plus/dresses.html
- H&M UK, Plus Sizes (H&M+), checked 7 September 2026: https://www2.hm.com/en_gb/ladies/shop-by-product/hm-plus.html
- H&M Germany, Übergrößen Kleider H&M+, checked 7 September 2026: https://www2.hm.com/de_de/damen/produkte/hm-plus/kleider.html
- H&M Germany, Große Größen (H&M+), checked 7 September 2026: https://www2.hm.com/de_de/damen/produkte/hm-plus.html