A top model’s life — three apples a day and STILL not thin enough
FASHION SIZE ZERO by Victoire Dauxerre (William Collins £14.99)
VICTOIRe Dauxerre’s career as a top model began when she was spotted in Paris, windowshopping with her mother. While she was wondering which watch to buy, a scout was out shopping for girls: fresh meat.
At 17, Dauxerre was actually rather old to be a new model. But she’d lost her appetite after a break-up and was feeling small and vulnerable.
‘No doubt about it,’ said the scruffy little guy who barely came up to her shoulders. ‘ You’re the next Claudia Schiffer.’
Dauxerre brushed him off, but her mother took his card. He worked for elite. That caught Dauxerre’s eye.
Though no great fashion addict, she had heard of elite, and began to imagine herself among the select group of women who’d passed through the agency’s doors: Naomi Campbell, Cindy Crawford, Linda evangelista . . . The fantasy of joining this band of supermodels was an appealing change from exam anxiety and romantic disappointment.
Within weeks, she was in the shabby man’s shabby office and, soon, the thing gained its own momentum.
Cameras flashed. She was told not to smile, but ‘half open your lips, so you don’t look withdrawn’. There were bigger offices, flashier people who promised her London, Tokyo, Dior, Galliano . . .
Nobody actually told her to lose weight. Starting out a healthy 56 kg ( 8st 11 lb) at 1.78 m ( 5 ft 9 in), her elite agent simply told her she had eight weeks to ‘get into the clothes’.
For photoshoots, a size 8 would be fine, but for the shows, she would need to ‘ reduce’ herself to a size 4-6.
Always the perfectionist, Dauxerre immediately set about shrinking herself. She began a diet of three apples a day, after reading somewhere they contained a chemical that would con her body into feeling full.
This was supplemented by the odd Diet Coke and, once a week, a piece of steamed chicken or fish. She dropped four dress sizes to 47 kg (7st 6 lb) in a couple of months, and the bookings came rolling in.
At one show, she was thrilled to be the only girl skinny enough to get into an Alexander McQueen frock that had ‘accidentally’ been made too small.
But success was not the exciting adventure she’d imagined. For 99 per cent of the time, she was treated like a clothes hanger, not a star. True, there were a few fleeting moments of exhilaration when she felt an adored and essential part of the creative process. But it didn’t compensate for the dehumanising hours of boredom, cruelty and isolation.
Photographers and designers high on drugs would paw at the models, then send them out in shoes several sizes too small.
Fine meals were served for everybody but the models, who would rush to the toilets to vomit up the meagre amounts they did consume, each locked alone into her own cubicle of guilt, shame and silence.
Dauxerre began purging herself with laxatives and enemas, upping the doses as her body attempted to adjust. Indeed, the French title of the book translates as ‘never thin enough’.
We all know the old Kate Moss line about how ‘nothing tastes as good as skinny feels’. On the contrary, Dauxerre’s story shows that skinny feels frightening, boring, lonely, cold, crampy, spiteful, angry and ashamed. Meanwhile, the industry groomed Dauxerre as though she was in a cult. She was reprimanded for being ‘too nice’ and ‘starting conversations’ with rival models. She was told her agency was her ‘family’ and she should confide only in its employees.
Her real family seemed too swept up in the glamour to heed her pleas for escape. Readers will be enraged to hear of her parents telling their unwell child to ‘stick at it’.
By the end of her brief career, Dauxerre was perpetually cold, depressed and regularly passing out. ‘I couldn’t concentrate on a chapter, an article or even so much as a paragraph. It was as if my brain couldn’t digest anything any more,’ she writes.
And this suited her employers just fine. ‘The ideal was to have the detached air of a girl who wasn’t interested in anything.’
As a consequence of her endorsed anorexia, her body started to grow insulating hair, and she was mocked online as the catwalk ‘yeti’.
She watched in horror as fake curves were photoshopped on to her pictures after a show. ‘He plumped up my cheeks, thighs and breasts and erased the bones of my sternum to give me an attractive cleavage.
‘So that was how things worked. We lost kilo upon kilo so that they chose us, only for them to put it back on as they saw fit . . . I had to admit that I was prettier with all those curves.’
By the time her parents realised how ill she was, it was almost too late. She attempted suicide and woke up to hear doctors saying she had the depleted skeleton of a 70-year-old.
Her periods had long since ceased, and she feared she had been left infertile like other models she had heard about.
And, after all that, she had only netted £10,000. All the taxis and hotels had been deducted from what had looked like impressive pay cheques.
But Dauxerre has been lucky. Good therapy has restored her to a healthy size 10 and she no longer owns a set of scales. She studied at the Sorbonne and now works as an actress in London.
‘I’m not cold any more and my periods have returned,’ she says. ‘I’m a lot less irritable and my brain is working much better now I’m nourishing it.’
She’s a gloriously angry voice, calling for designers to hire only models who are at least a size 10 and over the age of 18, so that no grown women are aspiring to the frames of 15-year-olds.
It’s the fashion industry’s turn to listen now.