The model Maud Le Fort against the tyranny of thinness

PARIS.

Maud Le Fort will not walk the catwalks at Paris Fashion Week, which began yesterday, as she chose her health over a modeling career.

Le Fort, now 30, arrived in Paris when she was 18 with the dream of walking for big fashion houses.

She was immediately labeled a “commercial model,” meaning not thin enough for high-end fashion shows. “She had a 36.6 cm waist and an 85 cm chest, so she was curvy,” she said.

“In Paris they told me that I was only going to do lingerie and maybe very commercial things, but not much fashion,” she explains.

Le Fort refused to give up on his dream and worked to lose even more weight. But without exercising, since muscles are not well seen on the catwalk either. “They weighed me almost every day. And the more weight I lost, the more congratulations I received,” she said.

He dropped to 49 kilos, despite measuring 1.81 meters. He managed to walk for Armani, Balmain, Jean Paul Gaultier and Yohji Yamamoto. But then she realized that she was crazy. “One day I said 'enough'. I'm going to eat, I'm going to play sports,” said Le Fort.

At 30 years old, she takes theater classes and undergoes therapy to regain self-confidence and leave the years of depression and eating disorders behind.

“I still don't fully accept my body as it is. “I don’t have a completely healthy relationship with food,” she added.

Currently he does photo shoots in which the pressure is much less. But she is also bothered by how much photos of her are retouched, as she believes it creates unrealistic expectations for young women. “It's absolutely shocking and sad,” she said.

Brazilian model Tatiana (not her real name to protect her identity) was fired from her agency after five years, when she gained a few kilos due to stress and hormonal treatment.

Fashion was the only job I had known since I was a teenager. “They fired me without notice. Losing fashion was very hard,” she said.

Both she and Sophie enthusiastically mention the 1980s, when feminine, sporty physiques were in fashion.

Today, the few examples of curvy models on high-end runways are people who built celebrity status before entering fashion.

Tatiana remembers seeing “very thin girls faint during tests; They could barely walk in heels,” she said.

He is now 37 years old, weighs between 53 and 54 kilos and is 1.78 m tall. She works as a test model, collaborating with designers who want to verify how an outfit fits a woman in the real world.

Other models manage to escape the trap.

Sophie (not her real name) is a 22-year-old medical student in Paris.

She works as a commercial model and dreams of the catwalk, but knows she has a longer-term career to fall back on and isn't willing to sacrifice her health. “Fashion is not an environment I would recommend to someone who is psychologically fragile. “If this was all I did for a living, I would be worried,” she admits.