Model’s exposé rocks fashion world
As a teen model Victoire Dauxerre starved herself to fit into size zero outfits, often hallucinating from hunger. At her lowest point the French beauty tried to kill herself. Six years on she’s written an exposé that has rocked the fashion industry
SHE’D walked the runways in New York, Milan and Paris for the world’s most prestigious names in fashion. Even though it was only a year since she’d kicked off her career, Victoire Dauxerre was ranked among the top 20 most successful models of the season. Dior, Chanel, Céline, Balenciaga, Miu Miu, Givenchy, Valentino, Alexander McQueen and photographer Mario Testino had all noticed her.
Lacoste wanted her for its new advertising campaign and Vogue Italia had just called. Would Dauxerre be its next cover star? Her agent at Elite was over the moon. But then the French model did the unthinkable: at age 18 she quit.
Deep down she knew she had to do it – for the sake of her health and sanity. At 1,78 m tall, she weighed a skeletal 44 kg. Her body-mass index was 15, which in medical terms means she was “severely underweight”. Dauxerre could fit the size zero (UK size 4) designer sample sizes, no problem – but the hunger was making her hallucinate. When she wasn’t hallucinating, she was passing out. When she wasn’t passing out, she was crying.
She recalls sitting by a hotel pool in Miami in the US on a photoshoot: “I’m in one of the most beautiful places in the world, and I just don’t want to exist.”
Her hair was falling out. At the same time, she says, she’d been told to shave her arms and thighs (a tell-tale sign of an eating disorder is extra body hair because the body is desperately trying to stay warm). She couldn’t lie on her back because she was in so much pain. A doctor would subsequently tell her that she had the skeleton of a 70-year-old.
Dauxerre hadn’t menstruated for six months. She counts herself lucky that she can still have children. “Model friends of mine are infertile. Or doctors have told them they will have to have fertility treatment,” she says.
What no one else knew was Dauxerre was in the grip of an eating disorder. To ensure she could fit into the samples that every model needs to wear to get work, she barely ate. When she did, she took laxatives and used enemas. “Or you can throw up. Another solution. I tried it but it never worked for me.”
It’s six years since her shock retirement. Does she think most models have some kind of eating disorder, I ask when we meet. “Yeah, I’m sure. Everybody encourages you not to eat. Because you have to be down to the bone.”
She recalls seeing a fellow model: “She was almost green; she had shining eyes like an invalid and she looked completely exhausted. I was worried she might die soon.” She’s convinced there are models who regularly put their health – and lives – at serious risk.
“Girls on the runway would say I’m lying. But they can’t say anything. There’s a code of silence.”
Who’s to blame? “The designers. They’re the ones who dictate our image of beauty.”
Perhaps what’s most shocking about her candid account is the dramatic speed with which an eating disorder took over her life. It was just eight months between being spotted on the street in Paris in 2010 (“You could be the next Claudia Schiffer”) and her taking an overdose in 2011. By the time she was hoovering up all the pills she could find in her parents’ house, the voice in her head was telling her, “You’re fat; you’re ugly; you’re crap.”
“I wasn’t real any more,” she recalls. “I just wanted to vanish so that it would all be over.” At this point, the model adored by designers, photographers, bookers, stylists and agents wanted to disappear – literally.
NOW 24, Dauxerre has written a memoir, Size Zero, about those eight months in which she starved herself on a diet of three apples a day and cans of Pepsi Max (the bubbles help with the hunger cravings). It’s not news that the modelling world is rife with anorexia and bulimia. What’s rare is for somebody to actually admit it.
Tall, with shoulder-length brown hair (it still won’t grow like it used to, she says) and intense blue eyes, Dauxerre makes for an arresting whistle-blower.
The book, based on her diaries, is a graphic account of what it really takes to be a model. It came about as a result of Dauxerre going public in her support of a bill in France arguing that excessively thin models should be banned from the catwalk. (The law was subsequently passed in December 2015, but doesn’t seem to have made much difference.) She was approached by a publisher who suggested her story might make a memoir.
The book became a bestseller in France. If she hadn’t quite become a household name on the catwalks, she definitely is one now.
“I had no idea of the impact,” she recalls. “It’s the book I wish I’d read before signing my modelling contract because you have no idea what it’s really like on the inside.” (Turn over)
(From previous page) It’s six years since Dauxerre stopped modelling and yet her eating disorder still haunts her. Until six months ago she’d routinely starve herself and then binge. These weren’t problems she experienced when growing up but the pressure to get down to a size zero has played havoc with her emotional relationship with food.
When the book was published and she was being quizzed about her use of laxatives on national television news programmes, she consoled herself with pastries and cakes, putting on almost 12 kg in three months.
When we meet in London, she’s on a more even keel. She’s a size 10 (UK size 14). How much does she weigh? She’s delighted to tell me she no longer owns a scale but she thinks it’s around 57 kg. “I just know I’m a size 10 and I’m happy about that.”
But a doctor has just told her she’s coeliac, which means she has an autoimmune disease activated by gluten. It’s 2 pm and she hasn’t had lunch yet. While we talk, she politely quizzes the waiter.
“Is it possible to have the cod with olive oil, no butter? Can I have just greens, no Jersey royals [potatoes]?” To drink? “Just water,” she replies, and smiles one of those megawatt model smiles we recognise from billboards.
IT’S summer 2010. Dauxerre is 17 and has no interest in fashion. But when she’s tapped on the shoulder by a scout while window shopping in Paris with her mother, she’s at a loose end – she’s about to take the entrance exams for a prestigious French college and a relationship has just ended.
The idea of being a glamorous model, flying around the world, being appreciated merely for having the right genes, is enticing. When she fails to get into the esteemed college, it becomes even more attractive.
In hindsight, she thinks scouts and agencies know exactly what type of girl to look out for. “They take you when you’re at your most fragile – 16 or 17. They want the bodies of little girls.”
But it isn’t only about being the right height and having the requisite cheekbones. “I was a naive teenager. They scout girls who are 15 or 16 or 17 because they know they can control them. They ABOVE: At one point she was surviving on three apples a day. RIGHT: With her younger brother, Alexis. [the girls] don’t know how to stand up for themselves. A 22-year-old would say, ‘Of course I’m not going to stop eating to fit into your stupid clothes.’ It wouldn’t work and they know that.” Dauxerre fitted the bill perfectly. “I’d been top of the class at school,” she tells me. “I wanted to be top of the models. And I was really childish, in the way that I wasn’t conscious of my body. I had no boyfriend; I was a virgin. I was really my parents’ girl.”
Crucially too, she was already skinny. As she says, “You only ever get spotted if you’re thin.”
On her first visit to Elite, they watched her walk and told her she’d need lessons about how to work the runways. They warned her not to tan over the summer. Next she was measured. Chest, waist, hips – or, as Dauxerre says, it’s actually the fat on your bottom they’re most concerned with.
She measured 86 cm, 63 cm, 91 cm. She weighed 57 kg. “Okay, we’ll lie,” she says she was told. “Because you’re never going to get into the clothes.” She learnt that the shows in New York were eight weeks away and she had to lose centimetres around her bottom. But no worries, they said, “You’ve more than enough time to lose it.”
Neither Dauxerre nor her parents – who weren’t part of this world but simply wanted their strong-willed daughter to be happy – questioned the proposed weight loss.
After doing some research on the internet she decided three apples a day would suffice – the pectin apparently makes you feel full.
“It was the same as preparing for my exams. I just had to remain focused on my objective. It was a question of willpower. And I had plenty of that.”
What’s interesting in an industry that’s long been lambasted for encouraging eating disorders and promoting an untenable body shape is that weight loss was never mentioned again. On the contrary, the subject was studiously avoided.
“It’s all unspoken,” Dauxerre says. “It’s pernicious. They don’t tell you, ‘You have to lose nine kilograms in two months.’ What they say is, ‘You need to be this size to fit into the clothes, otherwise you won’t get any work.’ Then each time you come back into the agency and you’re skinnier, they literally applaud you, ‘Oh my God, you’re so beautiful’.”
She recalls the catering provided on shoots. It’s all a show. No one ever expects the model to eat it. Dauxerre stuck to her three apples a day, sliced and fanned out prettily on a plate, and the weight obediently melted away.
When she began to plateau, she discovered laxatives did the trick. When she went shopping, the children’s sizes fitted her best and she was delighted. She had a “pretty thigh gap”, like the photos the girls posted on their dieting blogs.
“When I started my diet that was the goal I set myself, and now I’d made it – I’d pulled it off!”
Her hollowed-out cheekbones made her amazing blue eyes look huge.
By the time she was in New York – living in shared accommodation with two other models, homesick, taking sleeping pills – losing weight was the only thing
she felt she had any control over. It had already become an obsession.
“At this point,” she says, “I wasn’t me any more. The diet was playing with my mind.”
By her first casting, two months after embarking on her modelling career, she weighed just more than 44 kg. She remembers thinking, “Well done, laxatives. I was really proud of myself: I’m going to get into the clothes.”
The irony is that while she was swiftly cast for shows there wasn’t much Dauxerre liked about modelling.
She hated the waiting around, the grabbing and prodding, the burning hair straighteners, the cripplingly small shoes, the silent, judgmental designers. (She recalls John Galliano at Dior as being as impassive as a waxwork.)
She says: “You can’t talk; you aren’t talked to. You don’t have a first name any more; you’re a nationality and an age. You’re like a piece of fish at a market.” It was only when she was thrust out on the runway with the bright lights and the pounding music that it all made sense. “It’s like flying. It was my moment. Then you become an object again.”
There was something seedy about the late-night castings. She recalls being naked except for a thong backstage, and middle-aged male clients making her feel uncomfortable. “It was weird. I’d never even had sex. The first time I showed my body it was literally to everybody. They wanted you to be sexy on the catwalk but at the same time they wanted you to have the body of a girl. It was so f***ed up.”
Why didn’t she give up sooner? She’s clearly smart and used to standing up for herself. But by the time the shows were in full swing, her eating disorder was affecting her thought processes. The eager-to-please teenager liked the fact that she was one of the skinniest, that she could slip into the clothes. The attention made her feel good.
At the same time the idea of failing, of returning home empty-handed was intolerable. And so the anorexic voice in her head continued to goad her: “You’re going to get fat. Nobody’s going to choose you. Paris Fashion Week is screwed.”
By the time their daughter did return home, her parents seemed at a loss about what to do.
Dauxerre’s father, Emmanuel, tells me his daughter was adept at covering up with oversized sweaters and hiding the extent of the problem. At the same time the fashion industry is revered in France, “like food and wine”.
He and his wife had no idea quite how poorly their daughter was – and when they did realise, it was a mystifying illness to understand. Why couldn’t she just start eating again? “It’s not the same as someone having a broken leg and clearly being in pain,” her father explains.
After the shows, she was booked in for photoshoots where she had to be thin enough to get into the clothes but was photoshopped afterwards to give her plumper cheeks and erase the bones of her sternum.
“So that’s how it works,” she wrote in her diary. “We lose kilo upon kilo so that they choose us, only for them to put it all back on as they see fit.”
But it was only when Dauxerre did start to eat again and relied more and more on laxatives that she realised how messed up the industry was. “One time one of the designers saw me eating and said, ‘Oh my God, so it’s actually true. You can eat and stay slim.’ I just thought, ‘You’re so f***ing stupid.’
“I was fed up with feeling hungry, of being alone and of people expecting me to behave like an adult while treating me like a child, like a clothes hanger.” She’d earned €100 000 (then about R1 million) in eight months.
By December, she weighed 63 kg – more than before she’d begun starving herself. “I’d had the perfect body and I’d ruined it like everything else.” She informed her agency over the telephone that she wanted to quit. But even so, she says, they continued to contact her, telling her about the latest call from bigname clients.
But Dauxerre had had enough. “I went around the house collecting all the bottles of pills, got a large glass of water from the kitchen and got back into bed. I emptied all the pills out into my hand and swallowed them.” It was her 12-year-old brother who found her.
IT’S easy to like Dauxerre. She’s articulate, thoughtful, well-intentioned. If anyone told me their daughter wanted to be a model, I’d certainly suggest they read Size Zero first. Her life has moved on: there have been boyfriends; her weight’s finally steady; the book has been sold all over the world.
She recently graduated from the Sorbonne in Paris and is training to be an actress in London. (Not the most nurturing profession, I point out, but she says it’s what she’s always wanted to do.)
Earlier, I’d watched her do a shoot for The Times newspaper in London to promote her book. She tells me that the night before she couldn’t sleep.
Dauxerre obediently gets dressed in the designer clothes and follows the photographer’s directions – chin up, chin down, hands on hips.
Afterwards she says, “I felt like I was kind of stuck in my body. I couldn’t move. I was like a statue. It was weird.”
In between shots she glances over at the monitor to see how she looks. And she doesn’t like what she sees. “My legs look fat,” she says.
‘I was fed up with feeling hungry, of being alone, of people treating me like a clothes hanger’