She was running an art gallery in Boston when an acquaintance told her that Jordan Marsh, the now-defunct department store, was looking for large-size models, and that she recommended Mary.

Mary came in just after a horrible snowstorm, wearing all white. “I’m Mary Duffy,” she said.

The woman booking the models said, “Oh my god, you’re beautiful.”

Mary turned around to see who she was talking to.

Eventually Mary met a woman who had started what is believed to be the first plus-size modeling agency, Big Beauties, and who was looking to sell it. So in 1979, Mary bought it. With Big Beauties/Little Women—Mary added petites—Mary became one of the only women trying to make plus-size modeling a thing.

“It was a tiny little business when I bought it from her, and in two or three years…it went from Mary Who and Big What to ‘When are you next going to be in Paris, darling?’” she told me.

Demographic trends worked in Mary’s favor. In the early 1980s, baby-boomer women were graduating from college and having families, and the plus-size and petite among them had few choices. “One reason that there was such a stigma to being larger is that they were dressed in some shmata,” Mary said.

Having bought the agency, Mary began recruiting models. Some of the models Mary found had experienced rough upbringings and were insecure about their weight. Others were, just like standard-size models, quite privileged and full of themselves. One especially vocal subset was extremely religious. There, Mary’s practicality triumphed. “We had a lot of clients who were Jewish, and I said, ‘Put a lid on it, girls!’” Mary said. “You don’t have to say an Our Father before every snapshot.”

Mary was often her own PR woman and staged fashion shows whenever the agency needed a boost of buzz. On Fridays, Mary would sometimes serve her models champagne and pizza. To help them bond, yes—but also because some clients were slow to pay, and she needed to give their paychecks some extra time to clear.

This was before the plus-sized model Ashley Graham graced the cover of Sports Illustrated. This is before bootylicious and body positivity and Dove campaigns and Sir Mix-a-Lot. A lot of people, in other words, didn’t get what Mary was doing. “Fat models, are you kidding me?” is a refrain she heard a lot. When Mary had open calls for models, women would show up thinking that anyone could be a plus-size model, even if they weren’t pretty. And Mary’s mother never did come around. When she finally garnered press coverage, Mary remembers her mother saying, “Who cares? You’re on the front page for being fat.”

But what I got from Mary, between all the quips and the manic stories from diamond-draped 1980s New York, is a certain sincerity that comes through when she looks back on her life.