Candice Huffine: This model's career skyrocketed after she broke the biggest rule in fashion
Meet IMG's latest superstar
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Your support makes all the difference.Candice Huffine's career is taking off.
The 31-year-old plus-size supermodel recently signed with the major agency IMG, Fashionista reports. She will be a part of the company's Curve division.
She really made it big when she embraced who she was and rejected demands from agencies to lose weight, according to The Cut — thereby breaking one of the fashion industry's biggest rules.
Huffine has been a major force in the industry for a while, and her career trajectory is impressive.
Find out more about the model.
She grew up in Washington, D.C.
Huffine was in pageants.
When Huffine first started, she was just a teenager. She was size 6 but struggled to get signed to an agency, The Washington Post has reported.
One agency signed her as a plus-size model.
A lot of agencies told her to lose weight — even though she was a teenager.
She told The Cut: “But try telling that to a 14-year-old. A few places wanted me to lose weight, and I was like, 'Oh, OK, maybe that’s common?' I was a size 6, so I thought I was hot stuff. I was a freshman in high school, tight little body, thinking, I'm going to be a model. And then when someone is like, 'I need you to lose 15 pounds.' I [was] like, 'How do you do that?!' And then when I finally was handed a contract, the stipulation was that [they're] signing me under [their] plus board, and I never looked back.
”I don’t want to make it sound like the slim girls live a terrible life. They don't. For me, personally, if my body wasn’t meant to be that way and I had to struggle with that for many years, I would be a wreck.”
Even when she was a size 10, most of the work she got was in Europe. She worked tons of side jobs while trying to make it as a model in New York City.
Huffine got her first big break with a 2000 Lane Bryant shoot.
And in 2011 she appeared in Vogue Italia — and her career really started taking off.
“That will go down in history for me as a really major moment in my life,” she told The Washington Post. “People were looking at me in a different way. Curvy girls didn't have the opportunity to do editorial work that much. We were catalogue girls, online, e-commerce. You didn't really see us in an edgy, high-fashion way. That really changed the game.”
And three years later, she was featured in American Vogue.
She was also featured in its #PlusIsEqual campaign.
She has modelled for the Pirelli calendar.
And she has modelled for many companies, including Rachel Roy Curve.
“Maybe this new era really is more than ever about being and loving yourself?” She told The Washington Post. “If that is the generation we are in, that is an awesome one to be a part of because everyone fits in it.”
She takes care of herself; she works out. And she is out to dispel the myth that curvy girls aren't healthy.
“I have to work extremely hard to keep it, but I think it’s mainly a feeling: If you feel like you are a little puffy or maybe you have a few extra pounds on, of course you're going to make changes to do so. But there's no real pressure to hit the gym every day,” she told The Cut in 2012. “Also, I say this all the time, but the plus girls in this industry are some of the healthiest people I've ever met in my life. It's not like we're having parties at McDonald's. The girls I know, they're all doing yoga, run 3 miles a day, and they eat healthy, balanced meals.”
Signing with IMG is her latest big break.
“You can tell by their diverse roster of talent and their board that they have the same vision that I do, and that's something that I was always drawn to, so it's just a perfect fit,” she told Fashionista.
She feels as if she can achieve anything now.
“I do think, now more than ever, the sky's the limit for sure,” she told Fashionista. “I think that there's a really great opportunity to push the envelope and break through on a more mainstream level, and to encourage and inspire brands to advertise or represent different sizes, or even to extend the sizes of their current collections. There's constant work — and a voice, and a message — in showing that curvy women are chic and fashionable, and to represent that across the board in all media.”
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