In “Myla Dalbesio on Her New Calvin Klein Campaign and the Rise of the ‘In-Between’ Model,” Elle‘s Leah Chernikoff wrote two rather innocuous paragraphs:
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.”
To promote the article, Elle tweeted the following:
Twitter users rushed to correct Elle (and the ills of the fashion world) by pointing out that a size 10 is not in fact plus-sized. “Is this some kind of joke?” wrote one person. “A size 10 model is not ‘plus-sized,”‘ wrote another. And finally: “Proof society is effed up in a single tweet.”
None of these tweeters are wrong-wrong. Ad campaigns and fashion spreads should display a more diverse range of sizes and not top out at size 10. That said, the modeling world operates on a different scale than the normal world does. In fact, most models would be considered plus-sized when they reach a size 8. For straight-sized models, the ideal proportions are 34-24-34—a far cry from the average measurements of a straight-sized non-model.
So, yes. A size 10 is not normally plus-sized, but the world of modeling isn’t normal. Five-foot-seven is considered short, proportions or features that might seem alien in the check-out line at Whole Foods (sorry, I see a lot of models at Whole Foods) are widely sought for print and runway, and plus-sized (an actual category for many modeling agencies) include measurements that don’t apply to us normals. To reiterate, plus-sized there doesn’t equal plus-sized here.
It might be dumb and it’s DEFINITELY limiting, but Elle was not being offensive when they referred to Dalbesio as plus-sized. They were being literal.
Images via Elle
