“I feel like I should be asking you about yourself!” 24-year-old model Myla Dalbesio says to me mid-interview over sugar snap peas at The Smile on Bond St.

Dalbesio is a rising star on Ford’s illustrious plus board (that’s the same board that reps Crystal Renn, Candice Huffine and Marquita Pring). When she walked into Ford, Gary Dakin, who heads up the plus board there, proclaimed her the next Crystal Renn. But as you can gather from her guilt over the necessary one-sidedness of an interview, the industry she’s worked in for the past four years hasn’t squelched her earnest midwestern niceness.

But don’t think that this gorgeous model, who you’ll be seeing in a Dazed and Confused spread soon, is all sugary sweetness. Or that she’s just a model. She’s also an envelope-pushing performance artist, whose last piece titled “Young Money”–in which she dressed up like a stripper, covered herself in fake tanner and champagne, and stared down gallery goers, all while topless–got written up by the Times.

We reassured Delbesio that she didn’t need to ask us about ourselves (not that exciting, really), and we chatted about how she became a model, the state of the ‘plus size’ modeling world (she’d rather do away with the phrase ‘plus size’ completely), and how it all inspires her performance art.

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