The Conversation (0)
Indy100 Staff
May 21, 2017
Picture:
Ulrikke Høyer/Facebook
Ulrikke Høyer is a 20-year-old model who was recently cast in a Tokyo show for Louis Vuitton.
She was sent home from a recent Louis Vuitton show in Kyoto for being bloated, as emails published by fashion news outlets detail she was turned down for being "too bloated" despite having lost weight from her stated size for the show.
She has written a number of posts about the exchange on Instagram...
...and Facebook:
Høyer says Louis Vuitton booked her for her measurements in Paris, 92cm on the hips.
After arriving in Tokyo, (having measured 91.5cm with her agency the day prior), she attended a fitting.
She said a casting assistant told her she:
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’.
She didn't eat until breakfast the next day, where she ate 'the minimum'. After a following refitting she was told she would be sent back home.
In the Facebook status about her treatment, she wrote:
This is not about me being cancelled from a show, I’ve tried that before (all girls on my level have) you win some and you loose some that’s the game.
But 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. If this comes from them or some of the fashion houses I don’t know as I’ve only been dealing with the casters (Alexia and Ashley on cc).
Nicholas is super nice and treats everybody with respect and even remembers all the girls names etc. but these sizes of the show pieces are made for women to have eating disorders.
Go watch the show and see for yourself, even the smallest tightest pants are loose on the models they book.
Business of Fashionreports that Alexia Cheval, the assistant to Louis Vuitton's casting director, wrote in an email to Arnaud Daian (Hoyer's agent):
Nicolas [Ghesquière] was aware she was a 92 hips [sic] and fit her in a dress where hips were hidden. She came yesterday in Tokyo to do her final fitting, and she doesn’t fit the exact same dress anymore. She has a belly, her face is more puffy [sic] and the back of her dress is open and you can see it is tight.
Brokaw, the Louis Vuitton casting director, told Business of Fashion:
Honestly, I think that it’s a lot of misunderstanding.
We were told before she came for her fitting that she was a 92cm hip. That was fine for everybody and we told the atelier to make whatever we needed to make for her. We said that we’d make her a look and that we want her in the show.
She came to Paris, we made a fur coat to her measurements to her body and we confirmed her for the show. Two weeks later, in Tokyo, for whatever reason she came in for her fitting and the coat didn’t fit properly.
Once we were in Tokyo we were very limited by what we could do. We didn’t have the atelier to remake anything and we didn’t have a lot of other options to try on her, although we did try some other things on her and nothing quite worked. So it was a situation that was devastating all round.
He also denied that she was told not to eat or drink anything but water:
Nobody would ever tell anybody not to eat. It’s just not true. We have girls who are travelling for the first time from far away and they land and they want to beat the jet lag, so they start drinking tonnes of coffee and become dehydrated.
Somehow Ulrikke felt she had a message that she was only supposed to drink water and not eat food, the rest of her experience is maybe coloured by that. Whatever she’s seeing or feeling is obviously triggered by that. What is anybody going to do with the girl who hasn’t eaten in 24 hours? How is she going to walk on a runway?
Louis Vuitton has yet to release an official statement on the conflicting accounts.