The career of plus-sized supermodel Velvet d’Amour has been going strong since we first featured her a year ago in in the Aug/Sept ’07 Fashion issue of BUST. She became a dancer on the European club circuit, was featured in a music video for the Parisian boy band Scarlet Queens, she’s working on a book, and the film in which she starred, Avida, just came out on video in the U.S. In the wake of all these projects has come more and more publicity, of course, and in her latest interview, with News.com.au, she gives a shout out to her favorite feminist magazine for being the first print outlet to bring her story to the world. Here’s an excerpt from their HUGE interview with her. Go Velvet go!:
"You would think that it would be more of a story wouldn’t you? That a 300lb woman has modeled for Galliano and Gaultier. I’ve also starred in a French film that not only went to Cannes but went to Tribeca. And yet what womens’ magazines have ever picked up on my story? Besides one, and that’s BUST magazine – a feminist magazine. And I’ve sent my story to different magazines and I’ve never heard anything. And that goes again to show how there is that sense of not wanting to touch upon, like, the too fat girl.
I’m not a magazine publisher. But the reason I even went to the magazines wasn’t for, like, some sense of self glorification. It was because I am literally inundated with thousands of emails from women on a daily basis. And I cannot answer them. And I feel like a dick that I can’t. These people are nice enough to write me, to say that they think I’m beautiful and they have genuine questions about how I got to where I got, how I accept myself, and there are certain things that I’d love to share with women."
