It's Full Figured Fashion Week in New York. At least onscreen.
"Fashion Week Internationale," a new fashion series that's airing on VICE.com, chronicles the most outrageous fashion weeks from around the world.
In the second episode, just launched, host Charlet Duboc examines the first ever Full Figured Fashion Week, which took place in New York in June and promotes haute couture for women of all sizes.
The creation of a different kind of modeling event has proved controversial, as Duboc says in the episode's beginning:
"I came here to investigate the extent to which the plus size industry is really empowering fuller-figured women, or if it's simply a case of cashing in on the 'fat dollar.'"
At the show, a model clad in a Gaga-esque plastic bubble dress trips on her heels on the runway, then preens for the rest of her walk from the floor. More sashay in front of the crowd in bathing suits, outlandishly fringed bodysuits and more on-trend designs.
When the host asks a runway model if it's true that it's hard to be a plus-size runway model because your thighs rub together, one model laughs and says, "That's definitely true."
Later on, Duboc traipses through a "Curves In The City" sample sale, seeming bemused. "I wonder if I'll be the only 'empty-figured' person there," she says. There, she meet the True Sheros, creators of the world's only plus-sized action hero comic book.
Full Figured Fashion Week has one vocal fan: our own blogger, comedian Erica Watson. But it also, of course, has its detractors. Duboc interviews some ladies about town in Manhattan who (rudely, we think) poo-poo the event. "It's harder to make something fashionable if it's really large," says one woman. When Duboc poses to another what she'd do if she woke up one day as a size 22, she answers, ""Go on an immediate diet because I would feel awful and I wouldn't leave my house until I lost 100 lbs."
"I think they're wasting their time," the same woman concludes. "I think they should do petite fashions instead."
Watch the video below, and tell us in the comments what you think about Full Figured Fashion Week.