Plus-size models and £5 tickets: Sinéad O’Dwyer’s runway show puts inclusivity first

Sinéad O'Dwyer’s Fashion in Motion show took place at the Victoria and Albert Museum. Photograph: Peter Kelleher/Peter Kelleher/V&A View image in fullscreen Sinéad O'Dwyer’s Fashion in Motion show took place at the Victoria and Albert Museum. Photograph: Peter Kelleher/Peter Kelleher/V&A Plus-size models and £5 tickets: Sinéad O’Dwyer’s runway show puts inclusivity first V&A event celebrates all shapes and sizes as wider fashion industry stalls on body diversity Visitors to London’s Victoria and Albert Museum on Friday afternoon to watch Sinéad O’Dwyer ’s Fashion in Motion show would have encountered something a little different. The cast of performers and models wore everything from underwear to skirt suits and sequins, and sometimes danced interpretively on the catwalk to a performance by the band Jeanie and The White Boys, but most notably came in all shapes and sizes. O’Dwyer’s work has pushed against fashion’s insistence on a thin body type since she appeared at London fashion week in 2021. If most brands make the samples for clothes shown on the catwalk based on a size 4-8, she uses a size 18. She has won awards for her work, as well as celebrity fans including Cardi B and Björk. View image in fullscreen Fashion in Motion was open to the public, who could buy a ticket for £5. Photograph: Peter Kelleher/V&A Friday’s event – unlike a lot of fashion shows – was open to the public, who could buy a ticket for £5. O’Dwyer says this more inclusive attitude suits her brand. “In terms of the ethos [of the brand], it’s a lot more appropriate for everyone than the luxury fashion system, which actually doesn’t really want everyone.” For a few years, O’Dwyer was part of a wider shift towards body diversity in fashion – with Paloma Elsesser the first plus-size model of the year at the Fashion Awards in 2023, for example – but progress has stalled. The Size Inclusivity Report , produced by Vogue Business every season since 2023, found that for autumn/winter 2026, 97.6% of models were “straight-size”, or a UK 4-8. Fashion’s focus on the thin has been controversial since the early 20th century , with women’s bodies long subject to trends – slight with a small bust as an ideal in the flapper 20s, slender and leggy in the youth-obsessed 60s, athletic and curvy in the aerobicised 80s. The current rollback to thinness can be seen as part of a wider trend away from diversity. “It coincided with Trump coming into power,” says Jeanie Annan-Lewin , a stylist. “There are fewer people of any minority across the board and that’s the same thing that’s happening in fashion.” Emma Matell, the casting director who worked on O’Dwyer’s show and has also worked for Lueder and Tolu Coker, agrees. “It’s becoming more and more apparent that we’re back to wanting women to both metaphorically and physically take up less space,” she says. The impact of GLP-1 weight-loss drugs is also part of the story. “[They] mean cultural figures are shrinking, the general population, in many re