FASHION Magazine

Over the past year, a select few plus-size models—think: Robyn Lawley, Candice Huffine, and Ashley Graham—have been making breaks for the spotlight in mainstream fashion. From Vogue Italy to Ralph Lauren, these women have nabbed some of the biggest typically straight size (definition: 0-4) jobs in the biz. Though their work is a step forward for all women, plus-size models haven’t been accepted into high fashion as a whole.

The limited exposure of plus-size women in the market often makes it seem like there are only a handful of plus-size models working in the industry. On the contrary, there are a number of plus-size agencies with an even bigger number of curvy models working in New York’s modeling mecca.

To shed some light on these women, we’re setting out to profile the top up-and-coming plus-size models to watch within profiles of agencies that recognize their beauty. Today, we take a look at New York agency JAG Models’ top five girls on the rise.

View the Fall 2011 collection »

Created from the brilliant imagination of Danish-born designer Vibe Lundermark, the London-based label, Tabernacle Twins, is the latest to catch our eye. Lundermark is fairly new on the scene—she graduated from the Royal College of Art in London in 2009 with an MA in womenswear and knitwear, and her first collection showed at Fall 2010 Copenhagen Fashion Week. We only caught on recently but as we dive into collections past, we cant help but be hypnotized.

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Well, hellooooo down under! We’re loving Dress Up, the Melbourne-based label designed by Stephanie Downey. Dress Up started in 2006 after Downey completed a Bachelor of Arts Fashion from Melbourne’s famous design school RMIT, and has been gaining fans ever since. Recently, the label was a finalist in the 2011 L’oreal Melbourne Fashion Festival Design Awards, and Downey and her simple-but-chic wears and subtle stylings have been getting attention outside the far-away continent.

View the Spring 2012 collection »

Ostwald Helgason, the London-based label made up of German-born Susanne Ostwald and Icelandic Ingvar Helgason, is making some serious waves. Both have fashion backgrounds—Ostwald with a Fashion Design MA from Germany’s Burg Giebichenstein and Helgason with a combination of design, management, and tailoring—their individual interests in fine art and new technology come together in clean, modern shapes with a distinctly unique edge.

Thomas Wakeford is a womens-wear duo based out of London, designed by Thomas Wakeford and Toronto-native Raphael Castelmezzano. The boys come from different kinds of fashion backgrounds—Wakeford has from a design-based Central Saint Martin’s MA and does much of the designing while Castelmezzano, whose focus was editorial assisting and stylist, does all the styling—but the two come together in a way that challenges traditional notions of what looks good.

Working with simplistic silhouettes, the duo pairs fabrics that aren’t usually seen together—we’re talking about leather, lambskin, denim, lamé, rubber, silk, matte cotton, and more—and come out with clothes that are unexpected and very refreshing, or as Wakeford and Castelmezzano like to call them, “crude and contrasting.” They use cringe-inducing styles that have gone out of fashion, like handkerchief hems and patchwork denim, and are still able to make clothes that are utterly likable. Case in point: The frayed hems and the undone look of the garments have been described as “so wrong they’re right,” and the colour pairings are intentionally jarring. The Spring 2012 collection is bright and fun with easy-on-the-eyes colourful stripes that are almost Beetlejuice-esque. This young pairing keep getting better with each season, and we can’t wait to see what they come up with next.

London-based designer Omer Asim got his start freelancing with the wardrobe team of the Harry Potter films, but don’t expect to see capes or sorting hats in any of his collections.

The former architecture student, who also did post-graduate studies at the London School of Economics, learned fashion design during an internship with Maurice Sedwell on Savile Row. Asim prefers to “undesign” his clothes through pattern cutting, or rather, a lack thereof. In his spring collection, for instance, the designer cut pieces linearly, so that signs of construction were barely visible. His architectural background is also present with mixed textures, clean lines on dresses and pants, and panels of pixilated prints that brighten up the white and pastel colour palette that was seen on many spring runways.

Betina Lou’s cute clothes are secretary-chic, and we can’t get enough. Created by Montreal designer Marie-Eve Emond, the collection is full of high waists, decorative buttons, fur collars, and subtle details, resulting in classic, almost vintage-looking pieces that are simple enough to wear every day. It’s easy to imagine girls scooping up these threads and pretending to live their lives in a François Truffaut film.

If we lived in Baltic Europe, we would already be watching Paola Suhonen, the designer behind Finnish brand Ivana Helsinki. Suhonen’s clothes are captivating yet simple—she works mostly with cottons and wool fabrics, classic styles, fun prints—and each collection has a completely unique look.

Suhonen started the line 15 years ago, but says that it was building up for years before that. “My whole life has been one creative project,” she explains, and her inspirations are seemingly neverending. “Music is my great passion. I love Jack White, roadtrips, interesting people, good energy, my rescue dog Affe, old ‘70s films by Jörn Donner and Ingmar Bergman, great detective books…” she lists off. Seems like our kind of girl.

We love Toronto-based designer Leilanni Todd, for her hand-crafted and affordable wears, but mostly, we’re really into the laid-back attitude and style of her clothes. A fresh new take on the basics, her wears are the type you want in every colour.

Todd has been working alongside other designers for years, and ventured out on her own two years ago. Since then she’s been working with mostly jersey and leather, making turbans and turban headbands, mullet T-shirts and dresses, and leather-paneled shorts and leggings—and most are available in a variety of colours and patterns. Her styles are undeniably cute, and can be made-to-order with your exact measurements, which is a pretty sweet deal for custom-made threads.

Cary Vaughan and Jenna Wilson, the faces behind the Ace & Jig name, seem to be doing things a little bit differently—and we like that. Their Ace & Jig line is still in its early years, but Vaughan and Wilson are no freshmen in the fashion world; their premier line, LaROK, exploded onto the scene in the late noughties with super-trendy looks most commonly sported by the MTV crowd. (Read: kind of cute, but mostly tacky.) Starting LaROK, however, gave them the cred to move forward, which they’ve done with Ace & Jig—in many ways the antithesis to the fast-paced game over-styling and uber-trends.

While fashion and science don’t exactly strike us as similar topics, designers’ eternal quest for innovation—be it in fabric, silhouette, or colour combinations—seems quite the Einsteinian pursuit (okay, maybe that’s a stretch).

We’ve feared the permanent death of couture for quite some time now. Since being eschewed for the faster world of ready-to-wear in the ’70s, the art form seems to be shrinking in significance ever so slightly year after year. So it’s exciting to see new talent taking an interest in the techniques of old master couturiers. Take Dawid Tomaszewski, the Berlin-based designer whose decadent pieces display timeless elegance and attention to detail, establishing a “new couture.”