Size Zero: My Life as a Disappearing Model - Victoire Dauxerre

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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 come to a photo studio in the suburbs where they put together the

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