I’ve been covering plus size fashion for The Curvy Fashionista for about a year, but in that time, I’ve gotten a pretty intimate look at what it means to move through this industry in a plus-size body.
I’ve interviewed designers, creators and women building spaces specifically for us, and I’ve felt both sides of this community myself. I’ve been in rooms and events where being plus size felt genuinely celebrated. And I’ve been in rooms where I was the only plus size person there, and suddenly I wasn’t just myself anymore. I was standing in for every plus size woman, whether I signed up for that or not.
So, when I sat down with Kimberly Beasley ahead of ThickCon 2026 this October 17, I understood exactly what she meant when she talked about wanting spaces where plus size people don’t have to carry that weight alone.
Kimberly Beasley didn’t set out to build a movement. She set out to solve a problem she saw with her own eyes.
It was 2011, and Beasley was walking through a mall with her husband, still counting down her final months in the military after 20 years of service, when she noticed something: plenty of plus size women in the area, but almost nowhere for them to shop.
No boutiques built specifically for them, just the same big box stores everyone already knew. So, she did what any good entrepreneur does. She researched the gap, then filled it.
“There isn’t any plus size boutiques in this area,” she remembers realizing. “There was nothing specific geared towards plus size women.” That research became Curvatude, a boutique whose name says it all: curves with attitude. She opened the doors the first Friday of June 2011, while technically still active duty, running both lives at once for three months until her military career officially ended.
Curvatude became a staple in Augusta, Georgia, for a decade. Then the pandemic hit, and Beasley made one of the hardest calls of her career.
Closing One Chapter to Open Another
Running a true boutique, one or two pieces per size, no restocks once something sold, is a hands-on business built on people trying clothes on in person. A pandemic makes that nearly impossible. “It just didn’t seem like we were gonna come out of it,” Beasley says. “I think that it was just my time to move into something else.”
Announcing the closure on social media felt like a kind of death, she admits. But once it was out there, there was no turning back, and no time to sit in it either. Her daughter couldn’t attend preschool, so Beasley became a homeschool teacher overnight.
Her father was living with dementia. Her husband, working in cybersecurity, was mission essential and rarely home. Everything else on her plate had to stay. The business was the only thing that could go.
In the middle of all that caretaking, true to form for a serial entrepreneur still looking for what fits, Beasley launched Curvatude Athletics, a plus size activewear line. It didn’t survive a botched overseas order, but she doesn’t count it as a failure.
“I think Curvatude Athletics was not meant to stay, but it was meant to transition me into where I am right now,” she says. The brand opened doors to New York Fashion Week, twice, and Miami Swim Week. And what she saw on those runways changed everything.
The Fitting Room That Started It All
At her first New York Fashion Week, Beasley showed up with plus size swimwear and activewear, ready for her model fitting. There wasn’t a single plus size model in the building. When she raised the issue, a staffer disappeared, then returned with a woman who wasn’t plus size at all. “She’s big, you can fit her,” the staffer told her. Beasley wasn’t having it. “That’s not my girl,” she said.
The next year, she came prepared. Out of eight looks, she brought five of her own models and her own makeup artist, after watching the house glam team leave Black models looking dull with no glow. The production company frowned on it and restricted her artist to only the models she’d brought herself. Beasley didn’t blink. Her five models, she says, killed it.
What stuck with her most was watching the coverage roll in afterward. Vogue Czechoslovakia. Vogue Russia. Her brand got the press, but the coverage never featured her true plus size models, only the ones who could “pass” at any angle. The ones who most needed the visibility were the ones left out of it.
That frustration turned into a post on her page, a half joke about starting her own thing and calling it ThickCon. Her followers didn’t let it stay a joke. “People were like, do it, do it, do it,” she says. So she did the research, and the first ThickCon show launched last year.
When an Event Becomes a Movement
The first ThickCon sold out a venue that turned out to be too big for its own good, over three-hundred people in a 3,000-person space. Still, everyone walked away saying the same thing: it was great. This year, for ThickCon 2026, Beasley scaled the venue down and set her sights on something bigger in every other way.
She points to one specific moment as the turning point, when ThickCon stopped feeling like an event and started feeling like a movement. It was the model call. Beasley expected a modest response.
She got over a hundred applications through JotForm, so many that she had to upgrade her subscription just to keep up, and she still had to cut off registration and turn people away. Women were offering to fly in from California, carpool in from New York, anything to be part of it.
“When you have people willing to buy plane tickets to walk,” she says, “that’s when you know that you may have something on your hands.”
She calls it God’s little wink. The confirmation that she was on the right path.
A Family Business, Full Stop
Ask Beasley what people would be surprised to learn about ThickCon behind the scenes, and she’s quick to correct a common assumption. There’s no sprawling production team. It’s family, and she wants that understood clearly.
Her niece runs the front desk. Another niece handles VIP concierge. A third does makeup, the same niece she brought to New York Fashion Week. Her sister, who has modeled and run shows alongside her for years, handles the run of show. Her husband or her sister watches her back on show day, the only two people who understand her well enough to know when she’s about to tilt.
Her stepson Tyrese, now 24, has worked every single show since he was nine years old, doing security, setup, even sales when needed. This year, her nieces tried to take the day off and just enjoy the show as guests. Beasley agreed, until they realized someone still had to work the door and run merch. “I guess you are,” she told them. They’d already had time carved out since January.
The Biggest Lesson: Pivot
Beasley’s mind moves fast, sometimes faster than her resources can follow. She’ll picture the finished vision, a hotel ballroom, a full conference, before the groundwork is even laid. The lesson ThickCon has taught her, over and over, is patience with the process.
“Sometimes you have to say, this can happen, but maybe not right now,” she says. “Maybe what I’m seeing is a couple of years from now. What can you do right now? Where do you start at with this right now?”
It’s a lesson she traces back to her military training. Once a sergeant, always a sergeant, she jokes, and the mission now is ThickCon itself: figure out how to navigate around any obstacle without losing sight of the overall goal.
What’s New for ThickCon 2026
This year’s ThickCon 2026 moves to a new location, the Westside Cultural Arts Center in Atlanta, and brings a fuller entertainment lineup. Singer Alicia Marshall will perform, alongside the Atlanta based David Collins Band, who will close out the show. Beasley says attendees should expect visible growth in how the show itself is produced and run.
The day is structured in stages. VIP doors open at 1 p.m., with early vendor shopping, refreshments, photos, and swag bags. General admission opens at 2 p.m., giving guests time to shop and settle in before the show kicks off at 2:30 with the inaugural ThickCon Honors.
This year’s honorees for ThickCon 2026 are Nzinga Imani and Gwen DeVoe, the founder of Full Figured Fashion Week, whom Beasley credits directly as the reason ThickCon exists at all. She met Gwendevoe the same month she opened Curvatude, at Full Figured Fashion Week in New York, and calls what she’s doing now picking up that same mantle.
After the honors, a financial panel from the Wealth Academy takes the stage, something Beasley sees as essential in the current economy. Then the runway takes over: designers and retailers including Accentuate Me Boutique out of Augusta, Fluffy Diva out of Baltimore, Cherri Cheeks Swimwear out of Los Angeles, and 2W Thrift out of Atlanta, interspersed with performances, building toward the closing set from the David Collins Band.
More Than a Show
Beasley is direct about what she wants ThickCon to represent for the plus size community, especially at a moment when plus size lines and sizing are shrinking across the industry rather than expanding.
She cites a number she repeats often: the average American woman wears a size 14 to 16, and plus size consumers represent an estimated 87 billion dollars in spending power. Yet access to sustainable, affordable, well made clothing remains limited, and gratitude is too often the expected response to the bare minimum.
Her hope is that ThickCon becomes what she calls a beacon, a signal to brands and retailers that this community exists, spends, and deserves better than scraps. But just as important to her is the feeling inside the room itself: a space where plus size women, men, boys, and girls can walk in and feel good, unconditionally, before any business conversation even starts.
The Details
ThickCon 2026 takes place October 17, 2026, at the Westside Cultural Arts Center. VIP doors open at 1 p.m., general admission at 2 p.m. Tickets and more information are available at thickcon.com.
That’s the thing about ThickCon I keep coming back to. It’s not just a fashion show, it’s the antidote to every room where I’ve stood alone as the only plus size person, carrying a weight I never signed up for. On October 17, nobody walking into the Westside Cultural Arts Center is going to be that alone. Beasley built a beacon, and that day, we all get to stand in the light of it together.
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