Fashion Week Round : This is not your average parade

      Doors open at Fashion Week round in a few hours, and things are already going wrong: There are not enough chairs for the pink gift bags, the seller sent bad decorations and the stage of the band is in the wrong place, so that estimate the event staff as to fix the layout of the ballroom Hotel Affinia Manhattan.

As if on cue, open the doors and go Gwen DeVoe, Founder of Full figured Fashion Week and Executive Director, ready to distribute some solutions to bright pink heels. Sailing on the line, where they models including - brace themselves for a few hours, DeVoe quickly whipped orders to rearrange the room, signs with slender bills, signatures with one hand, then down the top floor to the locker room for Evening curves for the provision of treatment of breast cancer, where changes at the last minute outfit require his attention.

If it is clothes for the end of his career DeVoe models from the load back to the ballroom. But before she pushes through the double doors again, she turned her hair and without. Behind her hand movement "Honey, you've seen nothing yet," she said.

Full Figured Fashion Week in its fifth year this weekend, but still in its infancy, the annual celebration of the Oscars of fashion plus size women have been called, with each night, bringing an average of 500 models, designers, retailers, bloggers and industry buyers worth $ 14000000000 - or about 14% of the total market for women's wear - depending on the service consumption tracking NPD Group.

DeVoe, 54, a former plus-size model, but the inspiration for Fashion Week round is met only a few years ago. "I went to a fashion show, sitting there for 15 minutes, and I saw that I do not buy anything because I was too fat and not to have them in my size," DeVoe Above said in his hotel Affinia his makeshift office for the week room. "So I said," I need one of them for my people. "This is not rocket science. I'm all about supply and demand."

They followed the call of the year money leftover his tax return made on the first week of the Round method in 2009. At the time, she recruited volunteers and sponsors for their support sought. Now she uses a part time staff of 15, and sponsors such as plus-size retailer Lane Bryant and Sonsi to cover the production costs of the event, to hover around $ 100,000. (This is still only a fraction of what Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week start and runway shows designers some costs.)

Also growing interest plus size designer fashion on, and as Tim Gunn meet in an episode of Project Runway final DeVoe same movements throughout the year for up-and-comers. Where DeVoe once struggled to get press coverage for his shows, it now has more than 100 fashion bloggers who work as full-body personal press Fashion Week wondering round. And if the event does not identify the names from the list A as Anna Wintour or Heidi Klum, her known feature of his own community figures such as retired WNBA champion Yolanda Moore and reality star Rosie Mercado and Kenyatta Jones, who went to all the curves for a healing show in front of an enthusiastic audience full of women, mainly plus-size counterparts.

Some things have not changed: DeVoe keeps his job in the personnel department Scholastic day, they run their business planning events on the side in his spare time, as it has done for more than two decades. However, thanks in part to the sale of tickets for the public events of the week DeVoe is able to make a small profit in the week of fashion. Last year, she said she won $ 10,000, some of which they donated to this year's budget.

In the five years DeVoe led the show, the landscape of the full figured fashion retailer has opened to take note of the noise she and other women do. Brands such as Mango and ModCloth have their commitment to expand their options for curvier women plus size buyers increased. Last year, ModCloth, a seller of vintage-inspired clothing line, Oversized Products, who grew up in a disk of 8% of the turnover of the company in a few months. But that's not all - ModCloth also found that more customers spread in over size 25% more than in the other to spend buyers, and they are 66% the word of purchase. While more than half of American women wear size clothing is the most a lot of money on the table.

"Before it was like," Is anyone there? , '"Says Marie Denee, the blogger behind the DeVoe curvy fashionista week and called Round guest longtime mentor, personal way." Well, it's like,' Listen to me. I'm worth the same amount of dollars than any other. "

The morning after the benefit show, the third day of the week of the event will not begin in a hotel ballroom, but in a small photo studio midtown. This time there is no celebrity style, no sequin dresses, DeVoe and only a handful of future events and fashion designers who came as far away as Australia, Singapore and Costa organizers Rica to hear DeVoe a lecture on the production of fashion events 101 .

This master class is on the other side of the full figured fashion week. During Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week New York is all about business, too - only buyers, journalists and industry insiders are invited into the sacred tent - Production DeVoe is also a leadership conference as it is a showcase of fashion, and that was a part of the DNA of full figured fashion week. From the beginning, held DeVoe industry panels, seminars and networking events, and it is still considering its own webinars. This is another way for DeVoe, the. Well as the founder of a multi-city Academy plus size modeling in the late 90s to winding train the next generation of influential people