The inaugural cover of Condé Nast’s new Love magazine featured the unskinny — and undressed — Gossip singer Beth Ditto. And everyone lost it.

“Are fat girls finally trendy?” asked one London Times columnist.

“We are officially over skinny,” declared another. (A favorite assertion for that particular Times writer.)

The hype was strangely familiar.

Rewind two and a half years: October 2006, Paris Fashion Week, John Paul Gaultier spring collection. Enter Velvet D’Amour.

“Gaultier swaps size zero models for size 20!”

“Plus sized chicks are chic!”

How quickly the fashion press forgets. But are body image norms in the industry really changing? Plus-sized songstress Adele snagged a spread in Vogue. Curvier silhouettes reigned on a number of the Fall 2009 runways. Ultra-gaunt figures like those of Victoria Beckham and stylist Rachel Zoe are now frowned upon.

And yet, as the Guardian’s Hannah Pool pointed out, there’s reason why Ms. Ditto’s outfits in her Love spread left so little to the imagination. Note that both the Louis Vuitton feather skirt and Gareth Pugh elastic dress were both custom made.

Despite the warm welcome that Ditto and D’Amour have received from the industry, the reality is that the women of their size who do not have access to custom-made luxury fashions are out of luck.

Take the online luxury retailer Net-A-Porter. Sizes range from “XXS” for a size 0-2 to “XL” for a size 14 — the average size of an American woman. A search by size returns 10 pages of options for XXS through S compared to a mere 2 pages for XL. But someone of Ditto or D’Amour’s size, closer to a 3X or 4X, would have zero options.

The plus-sized pair may have reached icon status, but when it comes to shopping they remain, as one L.A. Times column put it, “invisible.”

So what to make of all the racket about “the end” of thin?

Columnist Sophie Morris seems to be onto something in her observation that fashion loves the extreme. But, as she points out, “[T]elling one fat rocker she shall go to the ball is not the same as giving the green light to women who like a side of food with their champagne.”

In other words, the occasional return of one end of the spectrum has yet to translate into clothing options for women of Ditto and D’Amour’s size — or to body acceptance for all of the “L”s and “XL”s in the middle.