At 17, Victoire Dauxerre was spotted by a model scout… just eight months later she was suicidal and battling with anorexia
Victoire Dauxerre seemed to be living the dream, travelling the world modelling for likes of Prada and Celine... but in reality she was severely ill and being encouraged to further starve herself by agents and designers
AT 17, Victoire Dauxerre was scouted by a top model agent and told she was going to be the next Claudia Schiffer.
But just eight months later, the brutal fashion industry and a devastating eating disorder drove the French model to attempt suicide.
At her worst, when Victoire weighed little more than seven stone, her periods had stopped and her hair fell out in clumps. She was so weak from hunger she couldn’t think straight, hallucinated and often passed out.
Yet on the surface, Victoire was a huge success, making catwalk appearances for Prada, Celine and Alexander McQueen. Vogue Italia wanted her to star on its cover.
Victoire was severely ill, yet fashion’s finest thought her frame was perfect to showcase their size-zero clothes.
She says: “The skinnier I got, the more jobs I got — so I just kept on going. When I went to my agency having lost weight, they would applaud me.
“This industry says to be beautiful you have to be skinny and sick and have no personality.
"It is harmful to the models and harmful to ordinary women who see the models and want to look like them.”
Victoire, who is now 24, has written a blistering account of her time with top model agency Elite.
She describes a disturbing cabal of designers and agents who encourage naive youngsters to starve themselves.
She says: “I think all top models have some kind of eating disorder. If you want to fit in the clothes, you don’t have a choice.”
The book reveals fashion to be a very ugly business — and Victoire isn’t afraid to name names.
She describes designer Miuccia Prada as a “witch” and tells how her 32A boobs were deemed too big by Chanel’s Karl Lagerfeld.
She says the fashion industry wants its models to have childlike bodies but act like sexually experienced women.
Instead of three meals a day, she ate three apples
Victoire says: “Sometimes you feel like a prostitute. You are literally naked all the time.
"They tell you to ‘make love to the camera’. It is very disturbing. Sometimes for castings you would have a callback at 11pm.
“Once, for a big brand, I had to wear just a thong and high heels and parade while the male casting directors swigged champagne. You are a piece of meat.”
Her story is not unique yet it is rare for an insider to break what she calls the “code of silence” behind fashion’s gilded facade.
Victoire was a shy teenager when she was scouted. While out shopping with her mum in her home city of Paris, an agent approached her and told her she could earn millions and travel the world.
It sounded like a fairytale. Victoire put her plans to go to university on hold and signed with Elite.
She says: “I had to go into their offices and walk for them. Then they took my measurements — my chest, waist and hips.
"I was 34-25-36. I was 5ft 10in tall and a size six but my hips were considered too big.
“They are really vicious and pernicious because they don’t tell you to lose weight — they just say they are going to write on your contract that you are 34in around your hips.
“They say, ‘Oh, you are a size six — well, the clothes for Fashion Week are size two . . . it’s in two months’.”
Weight loss became an obsession. Instead of eating three meals a day, she ate three apples. Pectin in the fruit suppresses the appetite.
She says: “I also started taking laxatives. The trouble is that your body gets used to that and you have to take more and more.
“In the end they stopped working, so I started using enemas instead. It was perfect for the clothes as I was a size zero but it was terrible for my body.”
As Victoire withered away, she was in constant pain.
Her bones ached. At New York Fashion Week she was cruelly dubbed “the catwalk yeti” because, like many anorexics, she had grown a coating of downy hair on her arms and legs.
She says: “It was as if the body replaced fat with hair to protect itself from the cold.”
But in fashion’s twisted world, this seemed normal. Jetting between New York, Milan and Paris to model for top luxury brands, her thinness was celebrated.
Over lunch, her agent watched Victoire carefully remove the cheese and dressing from her green salad — then praised her professionalism.
She says: “He’d come to the flat where I was staying and go through our stuff to check there was no chocolate or sweets.
“Some of my friends took cocaine because it suppresses your hunger. Others threw up.
“One of my friends ate one biscuit a day and nothing else.”
Victoire was so weak she would fall down in the street.
Once, in New York, she fainted in front of her agent. She says: “He gave me a piece of chicken when I came round. God forbid you give a model sugar.”
As one of the slimmest girls on the circuit, Victoire was booked for job after job. But she did not realise how ill she really was.
She says: “I was not aware I was anorexic. The girls around me looked green and like they were about to die. But when I looked at myself in the mirror, I saw fat.”
Victoire says she did not grasp what was happening, as the fashion trade had utterly dehumanised her.
She says: “I was just a clothes hanger and the clothes were more important than I was.
“You lose all your self-esteem. No one calls you by your name. You’re expected not to talk. There is no dignity or respect.”
Victoire believes agencies sign up girls very young so they are easier to exploit.
She says: “They scout you when you are 17, when you are very naive. They want to be able to groom you.”
Even more disturbingly, Victoire says models are at risk from predatory older men in the industry and she knows girls who have been raped or sexually abused.
She says: “It happens all the time. You are invited to parties and men will be all over you.
"My mum told me not to go to parties so I never got involved with that. I didn’t drink and never took drugs but I can easily see how it can happen.
“You are 17, you are pretty, you are surrounded by men and you are vulnerable.”
For Victoire, the tipping point came one icy day in Paris, during a lingerie photoshoot. Freezing cold, she walked off the set to warm up.
The photographer was furious and complained to Elite. The agency rang Victoire to yell at her.
She says: “They told me, ‘Who do you think you are? You are only a model’. I knew then I’d never be more than an object to them.
“I didn’t want to be ‘only a model’ any more.”
Victoire quit there and then. Elite tried to lure her back, promising her the cover of Vogue, but she refused. Feeling she had nothing left, Victoire hit rock bottom.
She says: “They destroyed me psychologically. I was so lost and ashamed.”
At her parents’ home, Victoire went from room to room gathering pills, then downed them.
She says: “I don’t know if I wanted to die but I wanted to kill the pain and that meant killing everything.
I regret that my little brother came into the room and asked what I was doing.
“I told him everything was going to be OK. The next thing I knew, I woke up in the hospital.”
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Finally, Victoire got help. She spent three months in rehab, taking calcium pills to strengthen her bones.
Docs likened her skeleton to a 70-year-old’s. She says: “I am really lucky I recovered because many girls don’t — they still have osteoporosis.
"I got my periods back but some of my friends who are 24 are infertile now.”
She was left with little to show for her suffering. In eight months she earned £100,000 but the agency and her scout each took 30 per cent, while deductions for travel and hotels left her with just £10,000.
Today, living in London and an aspiring actress, she glows with health. Victoire reckons she weighs around nine stone — she doesn’t own scales — and wears a size ten.
She quit modelling six years ago but only in the past six months has Victoire felt close to recovery.
She adds: “I can’t say I am completely OK. That would be a lie.”
Now Victoire is demanding the fashion industry changes — before more women’s lives are destroyed
- Size Zero: My Life As A Disappearing Model by Victoire Dauxerre (William Collins) is out on February 9, £14.99.