Size Zero

by Victoire Dauxerre

  I gave her the low-down. Flo, Vladimir, Gérald, the contract, the Polaroid session, the walking lessons and the measurements.

  ‘An inch around the hips is quite a lot, Loutch. You’ve never been so slim, and you’ve got an iron will!’

  She was right. But I was going to become a supermodel, the supermodel who everybody wanted a piece of. I was going to have a dazzling rise to the top, earn loads of money and kick off my adult life in an incredible way.

  I had just turned 18, Elite thought I was terrific, and in September I’d be in New York! When I got home, I weighed myself. At 5 foot 10 and weighing 58 kilos, I could get into a size 8. So I’d need to lose at least three 3 kilos to reach size 6, and three more to get to size 4. It was 2 July and the first castings in New York were starting at the beginning of September, so I had eight weeks to reach a weight of 52 kilos. Or let’s say 50, so that I had a bit of leeway. That meant a kilo a week, which I should be able to manage.

  I spent the rest of the evening on the internet, browsing sites and blogs by girls who offered slimming tips. It was pretty straightforward, in fact: I would just eat fruit. And more specifically, apples, because the pectin in them makes you feel full. I’d eat them three times a day, chewing tiny pieces very slowly, like Mum does when she eats a pain aux raisins. It was the same as preparing for my Bac or the Sciences Po exam: I just had to remain focused on my objective. I’d done it before and I could do it again. It shouldn’t be a major obstacle – it was just a question of willpower. And I had plenty of willpower.

  Playing With My Body

  Two days later, Mum dropped me off in front of the grimy old façade of a disused shop in the 10th arrondissement. I checked twice to make sure that this really was the address where I was supposed to meet Seb for my first photo session, tapped in the code and pushed open a rickety door which gave onto a dimly lit staircase with a grubby carpet. I very nearly turned around and left. It was quite a contrast to the agency on the Avenue Montaigne! At the bottom of the stairs, I came to a dark and cluttered room. At the far end, in front of a large mirror, there was a small table piled high with dirty clothes and a heap of spent make-up tubes. Syringes and used condoms were scattered across the filthy floor. What was I doing here?

  A smiling Seb appeared in the frame of a little door hidden off to the side in the shadows, accompanied by a sort of hairy giant whose huge belly was spilling out of a T-shirt that was much too small for him. No need to panic. Mum knew where I was and I could call her at any moment. Plus, I knew Seb and it wasn’t in his interests for anything to happen to me.

  Seb introduced me to Sergei the photographer, who took hold of me as if I were a rag doll and planted a huge kiss on both my cheeks. I felt myself relaxing – the guy was a big teddy bear, who spoke English with a Serbian accent you could cut with a knife. He told me I was ‘wonderful’, that he was ‘so happy to have the honour’ of doing my very first photo session and that I had nothing to worry about, because we were going to have ‘so much fun together’. He led me into his studio, which was a large, very brightly lit room with a huge roll of something that looked like white paper hanging from the ceiling and spiralling down to the floor, partially covering it. The light cast by two large projectors was both soft and bright. It was exactly what I’d imagined a photo studio might look like.

  Seb was pleased to see that I’d followed his instructions to the letter: skinny jeans, shirt and denim jacket. Sergei politely asked me to take off my jacket and my bra, pointing to an adjoining room where I could get changed. When I returned, he came over to me and in a very considerate way said, ‘Can I?’ I nodded and he undid several buttons of my shirt. I felt both embarrassed and at ease – I could sense that he respected me.

  During the two hours that the session lasted, Sergei always asked permission before touching me – each and every time. He asked me to move into the middle of the paper, which was in fact a kind of very luminous fabric, got behind his camera and said, ‘OK.’ Yes, but OK what? I had no idea what he was expecting of me. And so, patiently and kindly, he explained and guided me through things in his Anglo-Serbian jabber. I needed to relax. To put my weight on one leg to get a sway into my hips. To lower my head and raise my eyes. To play with my body.

  Playing with my body – what a strange experience it was for me! I was 18 years old, with a woman’s body but the outlook of a well-behaved little girl. That was no doubt why Hugo had left me – after a few weeks of gentle smooching and lengthy and passionate conversations about literature, his hand crept a bit lower than my breasts and a bit higher than my thighs. He sensed my reticence: it was the first time a boy had touched me like that. I wasn’t ready, or even sure if I wanted to be. He said that it wasn’t a problem, that we’d take our time and that he’d be patient. The following week, he was gone. That was where I was at with body games when Sergei tactfully started encouraging me to be ‘more sexy, baby’, to open my shirt, undo my trousers, prostrate myself languidly on the floor and surrender myself up to his lens. I went along with it and let him do what he wanted to do, because he was extremely kind and professional.

  He enticed me into playing the game. The less tense my body became, the more I started to enjoy myself. ‘I love it, darling. Wonderful! Look up for me! Look down for me! Give me more, baby!’ I swung my hips, ran my hands through my hair and crawled around like a cat in front of his lens, looking into his eyes. I changed my outfit, opened my shirt, undid my trousers. I struck the poses and began to understand the rules a little. I forgot all about Seb and just had a good time with Sergei. It was novel, funny, sexy perhaps, but without being sexual, surprising, strange and exciting …

  Seb congratulated me on the session. ‘You did very well, but next time it must be a flesh-coloured thong and bra. That’s one of the basics of the profession. Underwear you can’t see, even in see-through clothes.’

  There was no way I could have known that, but I should at least have thought of wearing some lingerie that was halfway presentable. The shame when I took off my jeans and realised I was wearing the tattiest pair of knickers in my whole pantie drawer!

  As I was leaving, Sergei took hold of me again and planted a big kiss on both cheeks. I deployed my best English to thank him for having been so sweet and so delicate with me. ‘Good luck, Victoire, and thank you for this beautiful moment.’

  After this brilliant photo session, time seemed to speed up. There was no time to see Sophie and tell her about my adventures as a future global muse or hear about her trials and tribulations as a future student of journalism, or to spend an evening with cousin Thomas. I was booked for the fashion week in New York at the start of September, the one in Milan at the end of September, and the one in Paris in early October. If I’d understood correctly, in each city the idea was to do as many castings as possible during the first week and hope to be chosen for the fashion shows in the second week. If I was lucky enough to get noticed, after the fashion weeks I might be chosen to do photo shoots for the magazines, for all the catalogues of the brands and even – joy of joys – for one of their ad campaigns. That was the ultimate goal: to be chosen for a campaign, to become the face of a brand and to be paid a fortune for it.

  While waiting for glory, and before flying off to the States with my family on 11 August as planned, I still had to arrange a couple of walking lessons, an appointment with Dad’s lawyer friend to go through the contract, a meeting at Elite to sign the contract and take possession of my book and my comp cards, and another one with Silent, the agency that would be representing me in New York. I had to do all that before heading off in the last week of July and the first week of August to Marseille, where we’d be joined by my grandparents at the lovely house with a swimming pool belonging to some friends of my parents.

  I had also planned to spend three days in London with Alexis to honour an appointment I’d spent weeks trying to arrange and which I couldn’t bring myself to cancel, even though it didn’t seem very relevant any more. Being an actress
had always been my dream and one day I’d make it come true. I had got it into my head to meet the agent of Robert Pattinson, who was my favourite actor at the time. His agent was a certain Kate Staddon, whose contact details I had found on the internet. I desperately wanted to talk to this woman about the options available to me for making it as an actress in England. I’d harassed her office every day for nearly a month until they were forced to give in to the inevitable: the easiest way of getting shot of this French girl was to agree to meet her, even if it was only for fifteen minutes.

  And so Alex and I headed off as planned for a little trip to London, where we stayed with his godfather and took in the pubs, parks and museums. This sibling escapade did us good, or it did me good anyway, coming as it did just before all these big changes in my life, and so in the life of our family too. We spent a long time talking about the events of recent days, and when I told him about my session with Sergei, he asked me: ‘Would you be capable of posing naked?’ I was completely unable to answer him, but we were in agreement on one point: if I ever did, it would be best if Dad never saw the photos. But above all, we took full advantage of our time in London together, exploring new parts of the city that we weren’t familiar with. On the day of my appointment, my brother accompanied me to the door of the agency and then stationed himself on the pavement opposite to wait patiently for me.

  Kate Staddon was charming. She told me that, in addition to being rather tenacious, I was really very pretty, but that nevertheless my only chance of becoming an actress in the United Kingdom was to knuckle down at one of the leading drama schools, where she advised me to spend several years doing a course in order to obtain a suitable qualification. And when I’d done that, she’d be happy to see me again to discuss my future. I thanked her profusely. I had understood her message loud and clear: theatre directors didn’t cast their actors by hanging around in the street. They audition professionals who know their trade because they have learned it, though perhaps they bumped into supermodels on international tours occasionally and suddenly felt a burning desire to cast them in a role in order to reveal their hidden talent? And supposing that never happened, perhaps those very same supermodels, after two or three years of modelling, would have amassed enough money to enrol in one of those fantastically expensive drama schools that Kate Staddon had mentioned?

  When I explained all this to Alex on the way to St Pancras to get the Eurostar back to Paris, where my walking lessons awaited me the next day, he listened to me attentively and indulgently. And then simply said, ‘Vic, don’t let yourself dream too much, will you?’

  Learning How to Walk

  Seb had told me that she was a former model. According to him, he was paying for a session with walking teacher Évelyne (€150 an hour) because she was the best person to teach me how to walk the catwalks, on which I was supposed to be parading in a few weeks’ time with perfect ease and with that feline allure that their name suggests. ‘Don’t forget your Balmains, otherwise it’ll be pointless.’ And so there we were, Mum and I, standing in front of the door of an apartment on the thousandth floor of a dizzying tower in the 12th arrondissement. The woman who opened the door to us didn’t look like a model at all: her feet were bare, her grey hair was held up in a messy bun by her glasses, she was wearing a colourful silk djellaba and her fingers were bedecked with silver rings. She gave us a friendly welcome and ushered us into a purple, orange and pink apartment full of Buddhas, candles, Indian wall hangings, rugs, embroidered cushions and a faint but pervasive smell of incense.

  She offered us some tea, pushed all the furniture in the living room against the walls to create a corridor for walking, and installed Mum on a chair so that she could observe everything, remember anything I might forget and then help me practise during the holidays in order to be ready for New York. I put my hair up in a ponytail, slipped into my performing sandals and off I went. She immediately saw that I knew how to walk in heels – ‘You have the grace of Lauren Bacall’ (isn’t she a Hollywood star, Seb?) – but that I was holding myself too erect, a bit like a classical dancer, and that I was much too tense.

  She showed me how to relax my shoulders and arms, right down to my nails, with a few little exercises. We spent quite a while on the issue of ‘Playmobil hands’: how to make sure that I didn’t resemble a Playmobil figure with stiff arms and hook-like hands. And so I learned how to think about relaxing my fingers when walking. And also how to swing my pelvis to relax my legs and to inject movement into my arms, how to lower my head slightly while looking up in order to obtain that ‘killer look’, how to erase any kind of expression from my face – ‘Above all, never smile!’ – so that I would look superior and detached from the humdrum world, and how to concentrate on always walking in a straight line. And of course she also showed me how to adopt that ridiculous gait that is peculiar to models: one foot placed exactly in front of the other with a high knee lift and a big stride, which makes even the most beautiful of creatures look completely stupid. ‘It’s a convention, Victoire, and you have to master it. Never forget that they’re looking at the clothes, not you.’

  After an hour of this, I was knackered. ‘Practise a bit every day. You’ll see, your body will internalise it all and you won’t even need to think about it any more.’

  In the lift back down to earth, it occurred to me that not even a month ago I’d been completely immersed in revising. And I couldn’t help wondering if I really wanted to spend the rest of my life focusing my energies on crucial issues like ‘Playmobil hands’. We were a long way from Shakespeare and global geopolitics!

  The question of the contract still had to be dealt with, and I was reassured that Dad was taking care of it. I knew that he would do what was in my best interests. I went with him to see his lady lawyer friend, who explained that Elite would be looking after me in France; Silent, who I had not yet met, in New York; and D’ Management, who I would be meeting in Italy in October, in Milan. All these agencies negotiated each of my individual assignments, charged a fee to the clients, kept a percentage of these fees and paid a small sum to Seb, who remained my ‘primary agency’. All my expenses would be advanced to me and the agencies would reimburse themselves at the end of the season from my earnings.

  When I asked Seb why Elite couldn’t represent me all around the world, he got into convoluted explanations about how in New York and Milan the small agencies had much more clout than a big machine like Elite and that they would be much better placed to look after me. My job was to make them want me, and if I placed my trust in him, he knew this world like the back of his hand and knew better than anyone what would be best for me. And for him too, no doubt, though I didn’t say that to him.

  He was increasingly getting on my nerves with his incessant chatter – the mere thought of him opening his mouth tired me out. But I decided to trust him. When it came to the important things, he’d made good on his promises: he had indeed introduced me to Elite and had made sure that I went straight onto the roster of top models managed by Flo. He’d paid for my sessions with Sergei and Évelyne, who were just the type of professionals I needed. And above all, he would be in New York with me when I took the big plunge.

  It was the first time in my life that I was going to travel somewhere without at least one member of my family. I was trying not to think about it too much, but it was making me really anxious. The fairy tale would have been perfect if Mum could have come with me, but Seb had made it clear that this was not on the cards. And anyway, if Mum came with me, who was going to look after the boys? In September, Léopold would be entering Year Eight and Alexis Year Twelve, and so it was important for her to be there for them. I was the big sister and I had to learn how to fend for myself, and so I was very happy in the knowledge that that pain in the neck Seb would be by my side to guide me through this alien world.

  Naturally it was Seb who took me to see Silent a few days before I left for Marseille with Mum. Rather than receiving us in their offices, they asked us to co
me to a photo studio in the suburbs where they put together the images and videos that they use to promote their stable of models. And so the meeting took place on the top floor of a warehouse, which you accessed via a goods lift. How cool! Everyone was quietly busying themselves in this rather grand loft space, which was like a well-ordered beehive. In one corner there was an open kitchen with a well-stocked buffet which Olympe and Madeleine were busy nibbling away at. I greeted them with a smile. In another corner, between two bulging clothes racks, there was a sort of dressing room where the girls were getting their hair and make-up done. I immediately recognised the very beautiful actress Emmanuelle Seigner, who was getting a blow-dry. Technicians and assistants were beavering away in a huge empty space that was surrounded by projectors and all the photographic and video paraphernalia.

  Seb introduced me to Louis, a tall elegant man with a piercing blue gaze who was wearing a pristine shirt and perfectly tailored trousers and was casually sockless in his smart shoes. He was one of the founders of the agency. He greeted me as if he’d known me for ever and hadn’t seen me in ages: ‘Ah, Victoire, I’m so happy you’re here! You know, we’re so pleased to be taking you to New York with us. We’re going to do beautiful things together! Have you met Émile?’

  He led me over to his partner, who was at the buffet. He had a nice-looking face, was slightly too tanned, perfectly shaved, had very white teeth and was wearing a rather crumpled linen suit and a pair of flip-flops. It was another kind of elegance, which jarred somewhat with the way he spoke: he was in the process of giving Olympe and Madeleine, who hadn’t moved an inch from the buffet, a dressing-down. ‘For fuck’s sake, girls, you have to know what you really want! We’ll be in New York in six weeks, and you go on eating regardless. Stop eating! We’re not going to take you there in that state.’