Calvin Klein is eating a big bowl of online backlash this week, over their new lingerie ad campaign showing 27-year-old model Myla Dalbesio and—allegedly—calling her “plus-size.”
For the record, Myla Dalbesio cannot be more than size 10, she’s probably closer to a size 8. Plus sizes start at size 12 in our book.
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I mean, this lady has a perfect body, for heaven’s sake. As Yahoo’s Lauren Tuck put it: “obviously [she] doesn’t fit in with the skinny girls but she certainly isn’t shopping in the plus-size section and her representing the category is perplexing to many people.”
Thing is, Calvin Klein never actually said Myla Dalbesio was plus-sized.
It started with an interview with Elle.com, where Dalbesio said, “I’m a bigger girl … 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.”
But Calvin Klein does not label Dalbesio anywhere as a plus-size model in the “Perfectly Fit” campaign.
A Calvin Klein spokesperson told The New York Times, “The Perfectly Fit line was created to celebrate and cater to the needs of different women, and these images are intended to communicate that our new line is more inclusive and available in several silhouettes in an extensive range of sizes.”
So who started the whole “plus size” brouhaha? A tweeter named Corso, who, on Monday, responded to the Elle interview with: “A little concerned Calvin Klein is referring to this as ‘plus size.'”
And then the world broke down, hell opened its gaping mouth, crazed demons started roaming the streets and fire rained down from the sky.
Samar tweeted: “there goes the fashion industry being gross again. Calvin Klein’s New ‘Plus-Size’ Model Is a Size 10”
Isabel Hardman raged: “Genuine WTF moment. This woman is described as ‘plus-size’ and ‘a bigger girl’. Aaaraagahagaagahahagahahag”
You get the point.
The reality as I see it is that women are getting bigger, and the CKs of the fashion world don’t want to lose them as clients. So they accommodate by creating bigger sizes. except that culturally they’re still slaves to the concept of can’t be too rich or too skinny, so they’re looking for women who are a little more endowed than the starved skeletons they normally use, but still not so hefty to make a homosexual designer lose his lunch.
There’s a lot of social conflict in that tangent. And explosions.
Tomorrow I’m going to burn a bra, just to keep focused.