It’s About Taking Ownership of Ourselves Again”: Model and Artist Myla Dalbesio on the State of the Contemporary Nude
As a model, Myla Dalbesio has graced the pages of countless magazines, though you’ll know her best from the Calvin Klein Intimates ads that propelled her to international fame. While the press Dalbesio received from the CK campaign focused attention on her status as an “in-between model,” neither straight-sized nor plus-sized, the Brooklynite is also a prolific artist whose work explores nudity, sexuality, and female empowerment. As a performance artist, illustrator, collage artist, sculptor, video artist, and photographer, Dalbesio has covered a lot of ground, from performing topless in her 2011 piece Young Money to creating sex-positive paintings depicting women’s personal ads to photographing herself nude. Style.com is taking this week to look at the state of nudity in contemporary fashion and culture, from the runways to the red carpet. We spoke with Dalbesio on the phone about her opinions on the subject. One takeaway: “Try getting naked in the wilderness at least once.” Read on for more.
“It’s really interesting for me when I see women really going for it and being so uninhibited about their bodies. It makes me feel so much better about my own body. Outside of ‘I also do nude things and it’s cool that they are doing it, too,’ it makes me feel better as a normal woman. It just gives the female body so much more power. I think nudity in pop culture is great, honestly. I think that any opportunity for women to do whatever they want with their bodies is great. I’m not going to run around the street topless just because you can do that as a woman in New York, but if someone wants to do that, fine…I think that for these very powerful, influential women to be making these—what seems to me like statements about the ownership of their body, that is really important. Especially when women are in this place where it’s 2015 and we still have to be freaked out about whether or not we’re going to cede our rights in America to abortion and things like that. Of course, women all over the world can’t get abortions or it’s against the law in some places, but something as small as wearing a sheer dress [can] establish ownership over your own body, which bleeds over into other larger issues.
“It’s about taking ownership of ourselves again. The other day I took a photo of some headline from Cosmo about sex parties or something, and I put it on Instagram, and then someone commented—some random dude with a private account—something like, ‘Is exploiting your body the only thing that you know how to do?’ I just was so offended, because I’m like, ‘This is, like, what men have been doing to us since the dawn of time, and for a woman to own her body and her sexuality—how is that bad?’ She’s taking back her power, and yet this is offensive somehow, when [her power has] been sucked from her forever?
“The work that I make with myself is really personal, and I think it creates a core for the rest of my work. Everything that I make really centers around a very powerful woman, and so I like to think—I’m not trying to think about myself as the archetype of the most powerful woman, but I think that, as a creator it’s almost like you’re really showing that you really believe in your product…The more I work with my own body by myself—I appreciate it and understand it more, and it bleeds over into my interaction with other women when I shoot them. I really love that I’m in this position where I can empower women to feel good about their bodies, and I think that the more that I understand my own, the better that I am at helping other women understand theirs…I just think women’s bodies are so beautiful, and it’s great to experience the beauty in all different sizes and shapes. Because I’ve been shot nude so many times, I feel like I understand the subtle intricacies and those interactions that make it something that can be really pleasurable and powerful for the model. It’s nice to be able to put that experience into practice as a photographer. Sometimes girls are like, ‘I feel weird about my stomach’ or ‘What about this roll of fat here?’ But I think it’s those things that make someone the most beautiful, and I think those things make for the best pictures, too. Having the ability to take something that someone feels the most insecure about and show it to them in a different light, or celebrate that in a way that makes them think, Maybe this is actually something that’s really unique and beautiful about me, as opposed to something that I need to feel ashamed of,that’s really special…
“For me, the sexual aspect is just another level of understanding the power that we have as women. I, as a teenager and a kid, I was never talked to about sex. I went through sex ed at school, and I’m lucky that I went to a school that had a comprehensive sex-ed program where we learned all about the parts and how you get pregnant and birth control options, etc., but my parents never talked to me about sex or drugs. Nothing like that. I had no dialogue about it, and I think that I didn’t—when I was a teenager and a kid—understand how important it was to place value on myself and my sexual powers. I feel like, because of that, I put myself in situations that were not great with men, and I think that if I had known when I was younger how great sex can be, and how important it is to understand my role in that, and the power I have to make choices, I wouldn’t have had to experience some of the things that I have. It’s such a taboo topic to talk about sex to anyone under the age of 18, and I think because of that, we’re doing young girls a disservice, by not letting them know really what they’re worth. That’s a huge mistake, and girls are ending up in really bad situations because of it. For me, to infuse this sexuality into my work…I just want women to feel like they can always, first of all, be whatever they want to be and look however they want to look, but also that when it comes to sex and things like that, they have power, they can make choices. You don’t have to be a prude, you don’t have to be afraid of it. You also don’t have to be having sex all the time if you don’t want to.“Moving forward, for starters, it would be great if we could free the nipple on Instagram. It seems, at this point, so trite to say that, but it’s also so ridiculous. I see photos of girls’ butts every day on Instagram, completely unclothed. Butts, butts, butts. I put a photo up of a girl’s butt, and she’s not a size zero. It’s a gorgeous photo, one of my favorite photos I might have ever taken, and she’s probably like a size 16 or 18. It was flagged immediately, which I think is crazy. It could be that I have more followers than the people that are putting up photos of butts all the time, but I don’t think that’s necessarily true. I just think that because it’s so juicy that they just couldn’t handle it. It would be great to see some more acceptance and celebration of women of all sizes.
“I also encourage women to try getting naked in the wilderness at least once. Go skinny-dipping once. It just feels so good. It feels very empowering, and you don’t even need to be with anyone else. There’s something about being naked not in your apartment or the bathroom, it just makes you look and feel differently about your body. It sounds really cheesy for me to say, but this is our natural state, this is how we were born. I thought about why I like taking nude photos in the woods a lot. It’s because, to me, it just seems strange to be putting someone in clothes in the woods. It just seems so unnatural. What article of clothing could I put on a model and put her in the middle of the woods or in the middle of that lake and it would look natural? I don’t think there’s anything that could work in that way.” —Myla Dalbesio, as told to Style.com
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