Candice Huffine, model who is adding curvaceous to high fashion

Candice Huffine glides through the elevators of Condé Nast in New York as though she were entering a friend’s apartment building. Her breezy demeanour is tinged with excitement. She is heading to the Vogue offices for a fitting for an event before the upcoming Met Gala. It’s a pyjama party based on the theme of this year’s benefit for the museum’s Costume Institute, "China: Through the Looking Glass," and a tall order for someone without a personal stylist.

"My biggest fear is looking like Lindsay Lohan in the movie Mean Girls," she says, half joking. "You know when she goes all out for the Halloween party and everyone else is in cute outfits?"

Soon Huffine is in the trusty hands of market editor Kelly Connor, and within 20 minutes she has settled on a black-and-white pleated Thakoon dress with a chinois red overcoat. No Lohan moments here. It’s an easy outfit but perfectly extravagant for a Vogue fete.

"What, you wouldn’t wear this to bed?" Connor says wryly.

The talk moves on to accessories, the merits of Claire’s jewellery and those fishnet chokers that had a stranglehold on pre-teen girls in the early 1990s. The experience feels more like rummaging through a stylish sibling’s closet than an appointment with America’s pre-eminent fashion publication, although the importance is not lost on Huffine.

At a size 12, she is categorized as a plus-size model. A few years ago, she may not have had the opportunity to work with high-fashion magazines, let alone receive an invitation to borrow clothing for an exclusive insider event. Huffine is at the helm of a new tier of models pushing to expand boundaries for curvy models and to eliminate the label "plus" from the fashion vernacular. That hardly sounds like an unrealistic goal in a country in which the average dress size is a 12 to 14. But for an industry that has been accused of having a dangerous obsession with thinness, it is a mea culpa.