ELLE Magazine: Myla Dalbesio explodes with laughter on the other end of the phone. “It’s crazy!” she exclaims. “I can’t even.” The 27-year-old model is talking about booking her latest gig, modeling Calvin Klein underwear in the brand’s latest “Perfectly Fit” campaign, which was shot by Lachlan Bailey. “It was such a surreal moment. I cried,” she admitted.
Booking an underwear campaign for such an iconic brand would be a coup for any model. But it’s especially notable for Dalbesio, who’s what the fashion industry would—still, surprisingly—call “plus size.” (At a size 10, she’s bigger than Lara Stone, Jourdan Dunn, and Ji Hye Park, the other models featured in the campaign.)
“It’s kind of confusing because I’m a bigger girl,” Dalbesio says. “I’m not the biggest girl on the market but I’m definitely bigger than all the girls [Calvin Klein] has ever worked with, so that is really intimidating.” She wasn’t sure, she said of the shoot, what was expected from her “in terms of her size or shape.” Refreshingly, what was expected of her was the same thing that was expected of Lara Stone: to take a beautiful picture. “No one even batted an eye,” she says. “It was very cool.”
So what does it mean for a brand like Calvin Klein—known for launching the careers of such svelte models as Brooke Shields and Kate Moss—to cast a model who deviates from the size 0 standard and not make a fuss about it?
To Dalbesio, who spent years abusing Adderall, crash dieting, and flirting with bulimia in an attempt to whittle herself to “straight size,” it represents progress. “It’s not like [Calvin Klein] released this campaign and were like ‘Whoa, look, there’s this plus size girl in our campaign.’ They released me in this campaign with everyone else; there’s no distinction. It’s not a separate section for plus size girls,” she says.
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So much for the right-wing war on women – seems that the liberal elitists in the fashion industry have their own war against women.
DCG
