Myla Dalbesio on Her New Calvin Klein Campaign and the 'Trend' of Plus Size Modeling

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 speaking about booking her latest gig, modeling Calvin Klein underwear in the brand’s most recent "Perfectly Fit" campaign, which was shot by Lachlan Bailey. “It was this type of surreal moment. I cried, ” she admitted.

Booking an underwear strategy for such an iconic brand would be a coup for any model. But it’s particularly notable for Dalbesio, who's what the fashion industry would-still, surprisingly-call “plus dimension. ” (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 really 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 was not sure, she said of the shoot, what was expected from her “in conditions of her size or shape. ” Refreshingly, what was expected of the girl 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. ”

Myla in an editorial shoot (Photo: Courtesy JAG Models)

So what does it mean for any brand like Calvin Klein-known for launching the careers of such slight models as Brooke Shields and Kate Moss-to cast a model who else 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 voracidad in an attempt to whittle herself to “straight size, ” it represents progress. “It’s not like [Calvin Klein] released this campaign and were such as ‘Whoa, look, there’s this plus size girl in our campaign. ’ They launched me in this campaign with everyone else; there’s no distinction. It’s not a individual section for plus size girls, ” she says.

There was a time in the industry, not too long ago, when it appeared that the high fashion world was using plus size models as a headline-grabbing trick (see: the groundbreaking Italian Vogue cover featuring Tara Lynn, Candice Huffine, and Robyn Lawley in June 2011; Crystal Renn in a 2010 Chanel campaign. )

Related: More Than a Trend? Women of All Sizes on the New York Fashion Week Runways

“I feel like for a minute, it was starting to feel like this ‘plus size’ thing actually was a trend, and that it was over, ” Dalbesio says. “There was which beautiful Italian Vogue story, and the girls that were in that ended up doing very well [in their modeling careers]. But when that happened, we felt truly excited; we thought it was going to open so many doors for all of us, you know? And it experienced like it hadn’t. It was dying out. ”

Now, Dalbesio is a bit more optimistic about size in the modeling industry. “I’m in the middle, ” she says. “I’m not really skinny enough to be with the skinny girls and I’m not large enough to be with the top girls and I haven’t been able to find my place. This [campaign] was such a great feeling. ” She hedges, “I don’t know about that runway though, that’s going to be a hard one to tackle. ”

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