singapore hotel: Full Figured Fashion Week: It"s Not Your Average Runway Show

Gwen DeVoe walks the runway at the Curves for a Cure celebrity showcase.

The doors at Full Figured Fashion Week open in just a few hours, and things are already going wrong: There are too few chairs for too many pink gift bags, vendors sent wrong decorations and the band’s stage is in the wrong spot, so event staff are sizing up how to fix the floor plan of Manhattan’s Affinia Hotel ballroom.

As if on cue, the double doors swing open and in walks Gwen DeVoe, Full Figured Fashion Week’s founder and executive director, ready to dole out some solutions in shiny pink heels. Sailing down the runway where models –including herself — will strut in mere hours, DeVoe quickly whips up orders to rearrange the room, signs clipboards of invoices with swooping, one-handed signatures and then heads down the hall to the dressing room for the evening’s Curves for a Cure breast cancer benefit, where last minute outfit changes require her attention.

As soon as she’s done finalizing dresses for her runway models, DeVoe is off, charging back to the ballroom. But before she pushes through the double doors again, she flips her hair and, without turning around, raises a hand dismissively behind her. “Honey, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet,” she says.

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Full Figured Fashion Week concluded its fifth year this weekend, but even in its infancy, the annual celebration has already been dubbed the Oscars of plus-size women’s fashion, with each night bringing together an average of 500 models, designers, retailers, bloggers and shoppers from an industry worth $14 billion annually — about 14% of the total women’s clothing market — according to consumer tracking service the NPD Group.

DeVoe, 54, is a former plus-size model, but the inspiration for the Full Figured Fashion Week only struck a few years ago. “I went to a fashion show, sat there for 15 minutes and saw nothing that I could buy because I was too fat and they didn’t have it in my size,” DeVoe says upstairs in her Affinia hotel room, her makeshift office for the week. “So I said, ‘I need one of these for my peoples.’ It wasn’t rocket science. I’m all about supply and demand.”

She answered the call within the year, spending leftover money from her tax returns to put on the very first Full Figured Fashion Week in 2009. Back then, she recruited volunteers and solicited sponsors for support. Now, she employees a part-time staff of 15, and corporate sponsors like plus-size retailers Lane Bryant and Sonsi help cover the event’s production costs, which hover close to $100,000. (That’s still just a fraction of what some designers’ Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week runway shows cost.)

Interest from plus-size fashion designers also continues to grow, and, like Tim Gunn on a Project Runway finale episode, DeVoe even travels throughout the year to meet with up-and-comers. Where DeVoe once struggled to get press coverage for her shows, she now has more than 100 fashion bloggers who apply to work as Full Figured Fashion Week’s personal press corps. And though the event doesn’t draw A-list names like Anna Wintour or Heidi Klum, it does feature well-known figures from its own community, such as retired WNBA champion Yolanda Moore and reality stars Rosie Mercado and Kenyatta Jones, who all walked in the Curves for a Cure show before an enthusiastic crowd full of mostly fellow plus-size women.

Some things haven’t changed: DeVoe still keeps her day job working in human resources at Scholastic, so she runs her event-planning business on the side in her free time, as she’s done for more than two decades. Thanks in part to ticket sales from the week’s public events, however, DeVoe is able to make a small profit off each fashion week. Last year, she says she took home $10,000, some of which she poured back into this year’s budget.

In the five years DeVoe has run the show, the landscape for full-figured fashion has opened up as retailers take note of the noise she and other women are making. Brands such as ModCloth and Mango have upped their commitment to curvier women by expanding their options for plus-size shoppers. Last year, ModCloth, an online vintage-inspired clothing vendor, introduced plus-size products that grew to an 8% slice of company revenue in just a few months. But that’s not all — ModCloth also found that its plus-size customers spend 25% more per order compared to other shoppers, and they’re 66% more likely to spread the word of the purchase. Considering more than half of American women wear some plus-size clothing items, that’s a lot of money on the table.

DeVoe, right, with Lucille O’Neal, author and mother of retired basketball player Shaquille O’Neal, at Curves for a Cure.

“Before it was like, ‘Is anybody out there?’” says Marie Denee, the blogger behind The Curvy Fashionista and a long-time full Figured Fashion Week guest who calls DeVoe her personal mentor. “Now it’s like, ‘Listen to me. I am worth the same amount of dollars as anybody else.’”

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The morning after the benefit show, day three of the week-long event begins not in a hotel ballroom, but in a small Midtown photo studio. This time, there are no celebrity models, no glittery dresses, just DeVoe and a handful of aspiring event planners and fashion designers who’ve come as far as Australia, Singapore and Costa Rica to hear DeVoe give a talk on fashion event production 101.

This master class is the other side of Full Figured Fashion Week. While New York’s Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week is all about the business, too — only buyers, journalists and industry insiders are invited into its hallowed tents — DeVoe’s production is just as much a leadership conference as it is a fashion showcase, and that’s been an integral part of Full Figured Fashion Week’s DNA. From the beginning, DeVoe has organized industry panels, seminars and networking events, and she’s now even considering her own webinars. It’s another way for DeVoe, who also founded a multi-city plus-size modeling academy in the late 90s, to train the next generation of curvy movers and shakers.