Emma Meyer knew she wasn’t in Kansas anymore when she found herself in a minidress outside Manhattan’s Chelsea Market two weeks ago being gawked at by tourists and yelled at by a fashion photographer with the soul of a drill sergeant.

Of course, in Meyer’s case, Kansas was Fort Wayne.

A year ago, Meyer moved from Fort Wayne to Chicago to be a fashion model and now she has moved to New York to see whether she can become an even bigger fashion model.

And yet she still seems to be the same sweet goofball that folks around here recall with pleasure.

“In the back of my mind, I will always still be me – always still be a little bit nerdy,” she says. “I really don’t think I will ever technically be comfortable (with the fashion model persona), because I can always run into that person (who) knew me in elementary school as an obnoxious tomboy.”

Meyer says she appreciated the constructive abuse of the aforementioned drill sergeant.

“He said, ‘You’re so commercial. You’re going though the motions,’ ” she recalls. “He forced me out of my comfort zone and put me in a completely different head space.”

When you are undulating in a minidress for an uninvited, probably international, possibly disdainful audience, your head space should probably be unique (or, as they say at the Redundancy Institute, very unique).

Meyer says she still finds the whole thing to be a little absurd.

As she said to a fashion industry professional the other day, “It is crazy to me that people grow up wanting this.”

And yet Meyer seems a mite more ambitious than she did a year ago.

In Chicago, where she worked for the Ford Modeling Agency, the jobs were few and far between and money was tight.

Meyer says a month when she worked twice was a busy month.

“I still spend 60 percent of my time watching ‘Futurama’ on my computer,” she says.

She signed with Images, a new agency started by Susan Georget of Wilhelmina Models fame, for roughly the same reason that a parent enrolls his or her child in a private school: lower-teacher-to-student ratio.

Or in this case, lower maven-to-model ratio.

“(Georget) has 12 girls under her wing,” she says. “At Ford, there were seven people taking care of the careers of 60 women. It was a completely different environment.”

Highlights of her year at Ford, she says, included a shoot in San Francisco where she got to brush elbows (and other parts) with a bunch of hot male models, many of whom had appeared on reality shows.

“Nyc, one of the guys on set, was talking to me and I picked up the issue of Elle with Katy Perry on the cover just to flip through,” she says. “(I) pointed to the guy next to her in the magazine and he was like ‘that’s me.’ Ummm, hello.”

And she was flown to Cabo San Lucas and La Paz, Mexico, in the dead of what was a notably bad winter, even for Chicago.

Already in New York, she has auditioned for a TV commercial and been a presenter at an awards ceremony.

It may sound strange to claim this about a career as flashy and potentially lucrative as modeling, but there is a strain of activism in the way Meyer pursues it.

Meyer is a plus-size model in an industry that is obsessed with weight, as in “the lack thereof.”

It’s the sort of bizarro universe where models like Gisele and Miranda Kerr, who collectively couldn’t muster enough body fat to fry an egg, are widely praised for curvaceousness.

“Wow,” Meyer says, “(Kerr) is a size two instead of a zero. She has a better body a month after having a baby than most women will have in their entire lives.”

Meyer says women with more realistic shapes are not at all fooled when models like Kerr are presented as zaftig.

“The fact that the girls keep getting smaller and smaller is completely out of touch with (most clients),” she says.

Looking at Gisele wearing anything gives no indication to a woman size 12 and higher how that garment is going to look on them, Meyer says.

Meyer says plus-size fashion has made some inroads into the mainstream fashion scene but there are times when it seems to her as if it “has been pushed off to the side … the weird kid in the corner.”