l Iove French women. Specifically, I love a French woman sitting in the Paris Opéra on a Tuesday lunchtime, belted into 10 grands worth of navy Dior couture and twitching like a liqueur-soaked marionette; even better, when she’s sporting a sapphire the size of my Adam’s apple on her right hand and employing a speech pattern so random, I can only assume she is doing some weird homage to Eric Cantona. Meet the French supermodel Laetitia Casta, or, to borrow from one of her more random moments of self-description: “My life is not a piece of shoes.” Pair of shoes? Piece of meat? Who knows with Laetitia. While the one-time Vogue, Sports Illustrated and Rolling Stone girl has excellent English comprehension, the conversational style is all her own.
Actually, “f****** crazy” is how she describes herself. And who am I to argue? There’s a theory that fame stunts the famous at whatever age they achieve it, so while in practice I’m sitting with a 36-year-old mother of three, the air of a bonkers 15-year-old hangs over the proceedings. It was at this age, on holiday in Corsica with her family, that Casta was spotted by a model scout and propelled to instant fame. She became the Guess girl before her 16th birthday and, by 21, had been anointed as Marianne — the emblem of French feminine perfection — with busts of her likeness erected outside town halls across France. She has been a perennial on tatty “world’s hottest women” lists ever since, but perhaps Vivienne Westwood said it best: “I don’t believe in God,” the designer once mused. “But I might change my mind when I see Laetitia Casta.”
It makes sense. Westwood is a professional supporter of big racks. Or maybe it’s the teeth that captivated her. Casta’s trademark gnashers are brill, gappy and goofy, like the Caramel Bunny. We’re wedged together on a banquette, and her words flute at me fast. “I am an old dinosaur,” she says of her place in the fashion industry these days. “But I enjoy now what I was fighting before. At 15, 16 years old, they try to change me. ‘Oh, you’re too fat, too sensual.’ So I tried to break the rules. I’d say, ‘Who do you think you are dressing in the street? A piece of wood?’ ” Maybe they weren’t thinking “piece of wood”, but you get the point. She says refusing diets and dentistry and being generally gobby have lost her jobs, but helped her get hired by the best. “My mouth was always open [figuratively]. I was known for that and sometimes I was not working. But the people who liked it was people really engaged, like Yves Saint Laurent, who say, ‘We don’t like model.’ ” A designer who didn’t like models? “Yes. That means they like woman,” she says.
In her time, she has been a muse to Saint Laurent and Dolce & Gabbana, though her current patron is the drinks brand Cointreau. She has just been announced as the orange liqueur’s “directrice artistique”, which I naturally assumed was French for “doing it for the cash, darling”.
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She has clearly been brought on board to appeal to lady boozers. Are French women like English women when it comes to enjoying a snifter? “Are you kidding?” she cries. “To vomit on the street? No, no, no. The difference between English men and English women [and the French] is we try to control everything. I enjoy l’art de la table,” she says, meaning food, wine and presumably a gingham tablecloth.
Can French women be — what’s le mot juste here? — uptight? “The cliché is terrible,” she agrees. Snobbish? Froideur-filled? Always wearing little neck scarves? “Me, all my life I’ve been fighting the cliché. The reputation of chic — I never asked for anything like that. It’s not me.”
But you followed in the footsteps of Bardot and Deneuve and were made Marianne, the pinnacle of all Frenchness. She shrugs. “You cannot make a generality. I guess also in England you have those cliché things that we think.” Such as what? Bad food? Borderline alcoholics? Bit fat? “To not be chic, actually.” Ouch. She starts laughing. “But this is so stupid. Elegance is not about where you come from. It’s who you are,” she says, then returns to spouting more gnomic wisdom. “As artist, we try to pass the limit. For us, the limit is the sky.”
Actually, “artist” is her favourite word. She utters it a dozen times during the interview. Granted, she has made a few films — she played Richard Gere’s mistress in Arbitrage (2012) — but not even “actress”, let alone “model”, will do as her career title. Casta says she approaches everything she does, be it corporate advertising gigs or walking the Victoria’s Secret catwalk, as “an artist”.
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At first I thought it was hideous pretension, but it turns out she’s just wilfully adolescent. In what ways are you different from when you were 16, I ask on a hunch. “I am the same. F****** crazy,” she says, laughing. I can’t work out if it’s noble or bonkers. Brought up in Normandy by her mother and Corsican father, she was “a nostalgic baby”, whatever that means, and desperate to do something with her life. When fortune came calling at 15, she grabbed the chance. You were so young, though, I say. Nowadays, I don’t think they would let a 15-year-old be in the Guess campaign. “Yeah, it’s crazy,” she says.
How did you survive? “I guess because of my value of life and what I believe in.” Which is what? She eyeballs me meaningfully. “Real beauty. Idealism. Engagement. I have to fight for the femininity to make people dream. Especially now, when you look at the industry. Everything has to look the same,” she says. “In my time as a model, they have to have a personality. Be eccentric and creative. Today, they all look the same. We have to f****** fight.”
She has a 13-year-old daughter with the French photographer Stéphane Sednaoui, plus a son, 8, and another daughter, 5, with Stefano Accorsi, the Italian film star. “Oh, yes, I’ve been lucky. I’ve met beautiful mens,” she says. Currently single, does she ever fancy getting married? “I don’t think I am the kind of woman who can get married, but I will say to a man one day, ‘I want to die with you,’ ” she says, eyeballs goggling again. “I’m very, very romantic. Big drama!” Are you an easy person to be in a relationship with? “I am easy,” she says, not entirely convincingly. “But what I represent can be scary for men. I fight all my life to be a creative woman and if you scare the bird, it will never fly again.” Potential suitors must make of that what they will.
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When not being creative, she lives a quiet home life and has no time for celebs complaining about lack of privacy. Her trick is simple. Don’t court so much attention. “When I hear some famous people say they wanted to have a normal life sometimes — pffft.” She tosses her hands up in despair. “They love it.” Casta has a different fantasy for her free time. “You know what would be my dream?” she says, breathily. “To make a big party in my house, invite different kinds of people, from different creative sides, but also normal people who want to be creative, and make this big dinner. I cook for them and everything is ready for sitting — but if I don’t want to sit there, I get up, I go upstairs, I take a bath and they come to talk to me. Then I go to my bed and read a book and some friends come and go away. This will be the perfect night.”
She’s crackers, I think. But that doesn’t sound half bad.