I attended a runway show at New York Fashion Week this year, and I managed to get a very good seat—in the front row, right where the models made their turns. As is often the case in fashion, the best part was not where I was sitting but with whom: two of the biggest players in the industry—the editor-in-chief of the leading magazine and a colleague, a former model.

Show time: the lights went up, and a model sashayed onto the runway in something that resembled Miami club wear, by way of an ashram. She wore black platform heels and short white harem pants with a white tailored draped top. A crackle of flashes came from the photographers. The clothes seemed to be a success. At a black-and-white wool herringbone suit, the editor exclaimed, “Yes! I love that!”

Then a model came down the runway wearing a skintight leopard-print dress with a V neck and a scandalously high slit up the front. There were gasps from the audience as the model narrowed her eyes and strutted toward us. The editor whispered, “That is an air-your-coochie dress!”

“Don’t look up!” the editor’s colleague joked, as the model pivoted on the runway.

This scene did not take place at Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week, where coochie jokes are about as common as last season’s sweatpants. I was at Full Figured Fashion Week, an independent event held this summer, in downtown Manhattan, to showcase plus-size clothes—14 and above. The editor-in-chief was Madeline Jones, of the magazine PLUS Model—an online-only magazine that is sometimes described as the Vogue of the industry—and her companion was Alexandra Boos, a former plus-size model who now runs the “curvy” division of TRUE Model Management and is the marketing and creative director for PLUS Model. For anyone accustomed to navigating the anxious crowds at uptown Fashion Week, Full Figured Fashion Week can feel like passing from a land of famine into one of plenty. The guests are more racially diverse—there were plenty of white people, but much of the crowd was African-American and Latino—and they come in every shape and size: short women with slim waists and enormous breasts, tall women with narrow shoulders and thick torsos, round women, pear-shaped women, and a few mesmerized men. The atmosphere is celebratory, rather than cutthroat. There were snacks, and buoyant music was playing. People referred to the “plus community,” and they wore T-shirts with slogans such as “Thick Girls Do It Better.”

Full Figured Fashion Week is the creation of Gwen DeVoe, a onetime plus-size model who now works in human resources at Scholastic publishing. DeVoe, a tall African-American woman with broad shoulders and prominent cheekbones, wears a size 18. She got the idea for Full Figured Fashion Week in 2007, after attending a Tracy Reese show at Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week. Reese is one of her favorite designers, and DeVoe told me she’d been excited about the show. “My friends were texting me, like, ‘Oh my God, take a selfie!’ ” But after watching a procession of clothes she loved she had a sinking realization: “None of these things are for me. And not because I wasn’t a buyer—because I had the money. But because they didn’t come in my size.”

DeVoe is the take-charge type: “My motto has always been, if you don’t invite me to the party, I’ll have my own party.” She raised ten thousand dollars in sponsorship money and spent ten thousand of her own to host a plus-size runway show. This year, its sixth, the event attracted about a thousand people, from as far away as Japan and Germany, and featured events all over town—parties, trunk shows, panels—culminating in two fashion shows: an Indie Designer show, which displayed the work of eleven plus-size designers from cities around the country, including Portland and Atlanta, and a runway show, which featured larger companies, including Kiyonna and ModaMix. For people working in the often overlooked business of selling clothes to large women, “it was recognition,” Boos told me. “It was no longer feeling invisible.”

To understand what fashion for plus-size women is, it’s important to understand what it hasn’t been—which is fashionable. At Full Figured Fashion Week, people often asked me to imagine a typical department store. Upstairs, above cosmetics and accessories, is the elaborate layer cake of women’s apparel: juniors, sportswear, swimsuits. There are sections for “accessible luxury,” celebrity lines by Jessica Simpson and Kate Moss, power suits, ten-thousand-dollar wedding dresses, designer jeggings. But these clothes typically come in sizes 0 through 12. To find anything bigger, you have to go to the top floor or the basement, “a hidden little grotto,” as Boos told me. “Like it’s the dirty secret, hidden between the tire department and home goods.”

Historically, plus-size apparel has had a conservative look. Its unofficial name, I quickly gathered at Full Figured Fashion Week, was “fat-girl clothes.” The clothes were heavy on basics—items like plain T-shirts—in stretchy materials and dark colors. They usually conformed to a set of generally accepted rules about what plus-size women should wear. No one can decide who wrote the rules (perhaps it was the principal of a very strict all-girls school), but everyone could rattle them off: Nothing tight or body-hugging. No crop tops. No loud colors. No patterns. No horizontal stripes. As a result, the plus section became the land of the mom jean and the muumuu—of dresses that were less fashion statement and more “tent to hide your body,” as one woman put it.

In the past five years, however, things have changed. Fast-fashion outlets—H&M, Forever 21, Wet Seal, and Mango—have rolled out new, plus-size lines, forcing their more traditional competition to catch up. Macy’s is spicing up its “Woman’s” section. (This season, a representative told me, the store’s in-house line, INC, is focussing on “peasant tops, soft pants, and jumpsuits.”) And on the Internet a new generation of e-retailers—the U.K. brand ASOS and the plus-size-only brand Eloquii—have found success selling trendy clothes to a younger market. “Truthfully, it’s gotten better,” Boos told me.

The improvements in plus-size clothing shouldn’t come as a surprise. Consider the demographics: In 1985, the average woman wore a size 8. Today, she wears a size 14. The U.S. government considers more than a hundred million Americans—and more than sixty-four per cent of females—to be overweight. Plus-size apparel represents almost eighteen billion dollars of the hundred-and-sixteen-billion-dollar women’s-apparel business, and in the past year it has grown three per cent. According to Marshal Cohen, a former retail executive who is now an analyst at the market-research group NPD, “There is money in it, and there is big, healthy money.”

The question in the air at Full Figured Fashion Week was whether plus-size fashion can find acceptance in the high-fashion realm. Last fall, Lane Bryant—the brand that most people associate with the dowdy, conservative look of yore—announced a collaboration with Isabel Toledo, the designer known for her meticulous architectural clothes. In March, Lane Bryant and Toledo put on a plus-size show in New York that was attended by editors from Glamour and Vogue. The former Vogue contributing editor André Leon Talley, who attended, told me that he was impressed by the show: “It was hip. It had today written all over the silhouettes, the casting, the shoes. Attitude. Everything.” Talley added that in the past three years he’s noticed a change in the women he sees on the streets. “The big girl rocks. The big girl is dope,” he said. “Walking down the street, all the big girls are looking and thinking fashion. They’re on point with the fashion trend.”