Velvet weighs 300 pounds (136 kg) and she’s absolutely statuesque in height. At size 26, she qualifies as super plus-size but she insists she’s healthy and, more importantly, using her famous body, photography skills and connections within the industry to promote bodily variety.

In a recent interview with Bustle, she recalls the time she first started out in the industry in New York, and how badly she too wanted to be a regular-sized model. By that, she means incredibly skinny, always starving and absolutely unhappy.

“They’d say you have the face of talent,” she recalls of what agents told her. At the time, she weighed about 140 pounds (63.5 kg), which was a healthy measurement for her but an undesirable ones for her future collaborators.

“At the time everyone was completely coked up and maybe 99 pounds [44.9 kg]. So I went down to 117 [53 kg] and they said I was still too fat,” D’Amour recalls.

Many things have changed for her since then: she shot to fame in 2007, when a photo of her in underwear and a red shirt reading “Please feed the models” went viral. She was then used by John Galliano and Jean Paul Gaultier on the catwalk with the other models and then, as they say, the rest was history.

D’Amour has now released the second edition of her fashion magazine Volup2, which she hopes will change the mentality in the industry about how only one body size can be beautiful. She’s also aiming to use “regular” women as much as models, to show that, sometimes, the difference between the two is merely in the mind of the beholder.

“The women we hold as icons of beauty are not happy. And if they’re not happy, who is happy? All the images that are out in the media were the same — the 16-year old white girl who is totally emaciated. And [she’s] beautiful, but she’s not the only one. Older women are excluded from fashion. Different ethnicities are never shown. I felt it would be cool to showcase the people that fashion left behind,” she says of the idea behind her magazine.