beauty

The reason this model was fired by Louis Vuitton isn't just ridiculous. It's insanity.

Ulrikke Hoyer says she is used to receiving positive responses when she tells people she’s a model, but her “glamorous” lifestyle is only half the picture.

The Danish 20-year-old has revealed what she calls the “flip side” of working in an industry that polices women’s bodies to the point of starvation in a series of scathing social media posts.

Hoyer, who is represented by five elite modelling agencies worldwide, claims she was cut from a recent Louis Vuitton show after her size 6 to 8 frame was deemed “too big” by the fashion house.

The company had initially approached Hoyer for the show, to be held in Kyoto, Japan, and when the time rolled around she was “relieved” to find she’d shed half a centimetre from her hips. But a routine fitting revealed that wasn’t good enough.

“[I’m] happy to know that even though I wasn’t in my skinniest ‘show-shape’ Louis Vuitton would still have me in their show,” the model wrote on Facebook.

A post shared by Ulrikke Hoyer (@ulrikkehoyer) on

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“Meanwhile, I was working very hard to get my measurements back to ‘right’.

“That day I ate a very small breakfast and had just water and tea before the fitting because that’s how we do it,” she recalled on Facebook.

“Later that night my french agent called me and told me that Alexia [Chanel casting agent] had said that there had been some problems during the fitting.

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“According to her, I had ‘a very bloated stomach’, ‘bloated face’, and urged me to starve myself with this statement ‘Ulrikke needs to drink only water for the next 24 hours’. I was shocked when I heard it. This was exactly what we have wanted to avoid when we tried to cancel because I was ‘bigger’.

That same evening Louis Vuitton had arranged a night out for the models and not wanting to eat in front of “a woman who had just expressed that I did not need food”, Hoyer opted out.

At breakfast in the morning, Hoyer consumed the “absolute minimum” and said Cheval even went so far as to check her plate when she arrived at 8am.

Still, it wasn’t sufficient and before her second fitting at midday, Hoyer was told she would be going home as Louis Vuitton had “cancelled” her.

LISTEN: Do you want to be fit? Or do you want to be thin?

“What should have been a truly amazing and unique experience ended up being a very humiliating experience,” the model wrote.

“I cannot accept the ‘normality’ in the behaviour of people like this. They find pleasure in power over young girls and will go to the extreme to force an eating disorder on you.

“I am glad I am a 20 and not a 15 years old girl, who is new to this and unsure about herself, because I have no doubt that I would then have ended up very sick and scarred long into my adult life.”

Worryingly, Hoyer’s experience is not dissimiliar to French model Victoire Macon Dauxerre, 24, who was once listed in the top 20 models worldwide.

After being discovered window shopping on a street in Paris some seven years ago, the 5 ft 10 teen was dubbed the “next Claudia Schiffer”. A size 8, she weighed a tiny 58 kilograms, but was still told to trim down.

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 Victoire Macon Dauxerre. (Image: Channel Nine)

"They never old me 'You're too fat', or 'You're overweight'," she told host Tara Brown on 60 Minutes earlier this year. "They took the measurements around my hips and I was 92 centimetres, and they told me 'You have to be under 90'. Then they wrote 87cms on my comp card, so I had to lose two sizes of clothes in two months."

Desperate to meet her agent's ludicrous demands, Dauxerre deprived her body of food almost completely. In her own words: "I actually literally stopped eating... I ate three apples a day."