How size 14 supermodel Crystal Renn has learned to love her curves

Crystal Renn's lavish curves and intense Cherokee stare have appeared in Dolce & Gabbana campaigns and on the Chanel runway. A size 14, she is the first plus-size model to achieve such success, and, partly thanks to her, Marc Jacobs has recently announced the launch of a plus-size range. 'Pant size does not equal beauty,'Crystal explains in her soft Mississippi drawl, dressed in leggings and a voluminous black shirt that, when she leans forward, exposes more than a hint of breast; glossy, raven curls spilling about her face. 'Beauty exists on its own.'

Now aged 24, Crystal Renn is a pioneer but she is also a survivor. She never knew her father and was abandoned by her 17-year-old mother, Lana, when she was three months old. She was raised by her maternal grandmother, a go-getting cosmetics saleswoman. They lived in Miami in a colourful house with a pool surrounded by a lush garden of orchids. 'My grandmother was an amazing parent, any sanity, wholeness, happiness, she bought to my life. She saved my life,'says Crystal. Together they would eat delicious home-cooked dinners, angel-food cake and blueberry muffins. On Friday nights Crystal and her grandmother would watch videos and eat popcorn, Crystal falling asleep in her grandmother's lap. Lana, who had run away from home aged 13, would visit occasionally but it was only when she had two more daughters that Crystal started to find it hard to understand why her sisters lived with her mother, but she did not. By this stage she had also been diagnosed with ADHD and put on Ritalin. She was an intense, precocious, bookish child with an obsessive streak. 'I remember I got into martial arts, and I would punch bags until my fists were bleeding.'

She became consumed with a fantasy about living with Lana and her half-sisters, eventually persuading her grandmother that they should move to Clinton, a small town in Mississippi, to be with her. 'I was 12 when we moved in with my biological mother. We thought she was better; she was not.'Crystal has never revealed the specifics of her mother's problems. 'I don't want to go into it, I am not ready.'Suffice to say alcohol, drugs and a mental disorder were involved. 'When I lived with my biological mother I guess you could say I saw the other side of life. I had been very sheltered. My grandmother had taken great care of me, I had pretty much anything I wanted. Then I saw that life can be quite bad. But I wouldn't be able to appreciate the things I have if I hadn't struggled, if I hadn't experienced such pain.'For two years, home became an emotional battleground, coming to a crisis when Lana tipped spaghetti marinara over Crystal's head and slammed her against a wall. When Lana attacked her own mother, who had interposed herself, Crystal ran at Lana with a carving knife shouting 'I will slit your throat if you hurt her.'

Crystal and her grandmother moved out and it was not long after this that she was discovered by a model scout aged 14. 'You're going to be a supermodel!'he said, and showed her a picture of Gisele in American Vogue. 'I had just been through this nightmare. I was sad and confused. Then this person told me I was beautiful, that I could go to New York, this place of big dreams and big success. I had never thought of myself as beautiful. In Mississippi, beautiful was blonde hair and blue eyes, at school they called me Pocahontas. So it was incredibly appealing.'The scout told her that all she needed was a 34-inch hip measurement and that, when she was ready, he would whisk her away from Clinton. That night she and her grandmother had her 'last supper'of fried cheesecake. The next day Crystal bought Elle Macpherson's Your Personal Best Workout exercise tape and did it five times in a row. She was five foot eight and weighed 11 and a half stone. Over the next two years she would shrink down to six and a half stone. She would drink huge glasses of icy water with aspartame and pretend they were milk shakes. She went to the gym every afternoon and become furious if someone else was on her preferred treadmill; every night, before bed, she did the Macpherson workout. 'I have this drive, this energy, this passion. If I love something it becomes everything,'she says. Alone in bed she would hold on to her bony hips and take comfort in them. By 2002 she had lost 42% of her body weight and was ready for New York. When she got to the agency (which Crystal will not name) they measured her and found she had a 33-inch hip, which was deemed too thin, so they lied on her model card and gave her the magical 34 anyway.

Now the challenge was to stay thin. 'This time in my life was so disturbing,'says Crystal. 'I lived in a prison where my thoughts were the bars. I couldn't enjoy friends. I couldn't enjoy food without having a breakdown.'Crystal joined two gyms so she could exercise for eight hours a day without raising concern. 'I used to think about the calories in everything. I wouldn't even have lemon in hot water. I might lick the lemon, just to tease myself, as a punishment.'She would also watch Nigella Lawson's food programmes: 'It was like porn to me.'But despite all this self-denial – or probably as a result of it – Crystal was not a good model. The pictures of her from this period show a starving little girl with a blank stare. 'I had all this passion about making beautiful images, I saw in my head how I wanted to look, but I couldn't connect to the camera. I couldn't even connect to myself. Anorexia feels like you are walking next to yourself.'At the nadir of Crystal's anorexia her joints ached, she was constantly cold, her hair fell out and her skin was a mottled grey. It is hard to identify that sick teenager with the vital, fiercely beautiful woman tucking into a honeycomb parfait and chocolate biscuit at a pub in Kensal Rise as we talk. In her memoir, Hungry, she writes about wanting to claw off her face, about not being able to speak, about keeling over in the middle of Madison Avenue. 'I don't know what death feels like, but this had to be the beginning.'By this point the agency had persuaded her grandmother to leave New York, insisting her presence was impeding Crystal's progress, and Crystal used to call her in the night and sob about pecan pie.

Then, in 2003 when she was 17, Crystal's body rebelled. She started putting on weight, even though she was only eating lettuce and steamed vegetables with fat-free dressing. One day, on a job, a photographer saw her and shouted 'She's huge!'Crystal was ordered to leave the shoot. On her way out she went to the complimentary food table and ate five plates of mini-burritos. That weekend she worked out for 16 hours. She went into the agency on Monday morning and they took a Polaroid of her. She was smaller than a UK size 10, but her agent said 'the thighs need to come down'. She told her her only option was to lose weight or become a plus-size model. 'Do you really want to give up?'the agent asked.

That was Crystal's epiphany. She decided to eat, to be her genetically determined size. She decided to become a plus-size model, a choice scorned by most of the fashion industry, associated, as it was, with naff catalogue work and girls so big they are impossible to dress. Prior to Crystal the only plus model to achieve any real fame was Sophie Dahl, and she quickly thinned herself down to regulation size. 'I said to myself, I am done. I went to lunch that day and had salad with walnuts and salmon. I had olive oil with my balsamic. The voice was still there, saying those things will make you fat. But I had made up my mind. I am a control freak, a perfectionist, but I had to learn how to control my controlling nature.'

Crystal met Gary Dakin of Ford model agency, who became her champion and surrogate father. She was put in a model apartment where, 'all I did for two months was order food. I was thrilled to be a plus-size model. For me it was freedom. I could be the size that I wanted and be happy.'

She also became successful. Suddenly she was able to create the beautiful images she held in her mind. She was shot by Steven Meisel for American and Italian Vogue. Carine Roitfeld styled her for Vogue Paris. In 2005 she walked in the Jean Paul Gaultier show, and in 2006, starred in the Dolce & Gabbana campaign. Her previous agency had told her that as a plus-size model she would never do magazine shoots again. Crystal broke the mould.

'It was by rechannelling all that energy, all that passion, that I became successful. Instead of focusing on being perfect externally, I just needed to focus on being perfect on the inside. I had to ask myself, what do I think of as beautiful, can I be beautiful to myself, am I proud of me?'

Crystal suddenly had breasts, flesh, she became aware of herself as a sexual being. At 19, when she met Greg Vrecenak, a teacher of underprivileged children, she was still a virgin. They fell in love and married in 2007. Dakin walked her down the aisle and she wore a dress with butterfly wings. She looked resplendent and ethereal, and ate red velvet cupcakes. They moved to Brooklyn and got two Maltese dogs. When I ask if she still has the miniature white fluffy pets, for the first time during our interview Crystal looks diminished. 'No, we broke up,'she says, her voice small, her gaze averted. 'It's for the better.'In Hungry, Crystal describes how Greg would get upset by the amount of time she had to spend travelling for work and the dissonance between her professional and their personal life. This, ultimately, seems to be what put paid to their relationship last June. 'I am a nomad, I have to be able to be in Morocco on Friday if that is what I feel like,'she explains.