Of course, there was Jessica McClintock, and fortunately I was able to pull clothes from the Hugo Boss store, because virtually no designer fashion house has size 14. The alternative was to get clothes from studio services at retail establishments like Bloomingdale’s–but the choice of merchandise was pretty awful. Because it was a December issue, I had to use several fur coats (fur houses always stock larger sizes coats) and close-up shots of fabulous diamond and pearl necklaces. Otherwise the shoot would have ended as a four-page story.

In her article “Plus Size Wars” in the New York Times Magazine this past August 1, Ginia Bellafante details the difficulty for fashion companies to enter the market to make large size clothes. While thin bodies are on the whole more uniform, fat bodies are strikingly different, which means standardized sizing is nearly impossible. Due to this lack of available clothes, I mean great looking clothes, I have never attempted a second effort in featuring plus size models.

There was so much talk this spring after Prada and Louis Vuitton heralded the return of the curvy sex-pots to the fashion scene. In Paris, Laetitia Casta opened the Vuitton show in a charcoal stripe a-line dress falling just below the knees and belted at the waist, a silhouette that was repeated through the entire show. Curvy women, yes; and that’s perhaps a momentous step forward from the recent years of non-stop conferences, meetings and discourses on the perennial topic of too skinny models. There was even attempts to ban models deemed too skinny. Perhaps now the momentum has shifted for fashion to include women wearing sizes higher than a 10.

But nowhere is the notion that looks can be deceiving truer than in fashion. While projecting the image of a fuller sized woman, these clothes are runways samples and as such they are still size 4-6. That’s fashion ingenuity–fabricating a look visually.

Fashion, by this I mean designer brands rather than manufacturers, is only starting to assess the plus size market. Recently there were talks that >Marc Jacobs is looking at expanding into this arena. Considering the fact the over two thirds of American women are overweight and of that a third are obese, fashion has virtually ignore plus size, save for very few companies that make clothes specific to the market.

That Chanel has casted the model >Crystal Renn for its campaign to reopen the Soho store, after she had done the Cruise St Tropez show early in May, is a significant start. Ms. Renn also appears in >Jean Paul Gaultier’s fall ad. Perhaps when magazine begins to use plus size models on a regular basis rather than doing so as a current fad, changes will be possible.

It is critical that more fashion brands continue to feature a size 14 here a size 16 there mixing in with the crop of size 2s and 4s. We need to see these full figured women as objects of beauty and portrayed by the big fashion brands with the same conviction and commitments as supermodels and superstars. Fashion can change how plus size people are perceived. After all, pornography conquered the ‘fat’ taboo in the past decade. Now that BBW has gone mainstream, can fashion follow suite?

As we approach another season, this is a good questions to ponder. It would be sad to see the current obsession with plus size sink as another momentary passing trends, a sort of lip service that the fashion industry specializes. If this happens, it says something about us, too.

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