Become a top model in the 1990s, “the girl with the dragon tattoo”, Ève Salvail was on the podcast of Richard Martineau and Sophie Durocher where she made surprising revelations.
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In this episode of “Piquant aperitif”, she notably returned to the dark sides of the fashion industry around which gravitated odious characters like Harvey Weinstein, who considered her “one of the boys” and who allegedly recounted the abuse he committed against the women he met in his office and in hotels.
The model, who says she “became beautiful overnight”, gave herself up in all humility to the couple of animators, confiding in her consumption of alcohol and drugs and the toxicity of the environment which valued the trend of the ‘”heroine chic”, at that time when grunge and Nirvana were at the top of the charts.
While her job was to sell her look, to survive in this environment “an extraordinary ego and a lot of drugs”, she replied tit for tat to Richard and Sophie, insisting on the fact that the slightest defects bodies were underlined.
The insecurities of models
Ève Salvail grew up in Matane, Bas-Saint-Laurent, with the feeling of being “the ugly duckling” of her hometown. During the episode, she notably confided that she always felt different, even disturbing by her eccentricity and by the fact that she did not fit into the norms.
“When we are young, at school, popular girls are the first to have breasts, the rest of us [les mannequins] we are often “flat” like a board. […] I was really very clumsy and I had no breasts. I had no hips and looked like a short guy, and I was too tall compared [aux autres]. Little guys don’t like it when the girls are taller than them.”
According to her, all models, no matter how famous, are confronted early in their life with this feeling of insecurity, for these reasons. Shy by nature, it was to protect herself that she adopted her emblematic look: shaved head tattooed with a dragon, which made Jean-Paul Gauthier say that she was both “fragile and violent”.
“Inside, I am a child who is afraid of everything. To protect myself, I put on an extremely strong look, and it works, people are extremely intimidated by that,” she said.