Beauty pageants are sexual events. Let’s not debate it. Despite claims by many that they’re merely a celebration of health, beauty, and talent, they provoke a subtly sexual reaction, a bit like the foot rubs in the film Pulp Fiction. To quote Vincent Vega: “We act like they don’t, but they do. There’s a sensuous thing going on where you don’t talk about it, but you know it.” Isabelle Chaudieu certainly must have known it. She won the title of Miss France today in 1984, four days before her eighteenth birthday. Unfortunately for pageant organizers, she had already posed nude for a professional photographer. The French magazine Lui bought the photos, paired them with shots of Chaudieu in her pageant regalia, and splashed them inside its February 1985 issue. In France as elsewhere magazines hit the newsstands a bit earlier than their official publication date, which led to Chaudieu being stripped of her title on the 31st of January 1985 and being replaced by runner-up Carole Tredille.
Beauty pageants are falling out of favor. There’s no doubt of that. More people are beginning to understand our original point that they’re basically sexual in nature. This isn’t because such people have dirty minds. Reasonably speaking, when people see a woman parade up and down in a bathing suit they aren’t imagining her swimming the 200 meter butterfly—they’re imagining her peeling out of the suit and performing the Venus butterfly. Sex is the reason every one of us came into being and is the main goal, biologically speaking, of all our lives. It’s just plain silly to expect people not to be reminded of it. And pageant organizers know their product does exactly that, which is why they punish women like Chaudieu, Vanessa Williams, and others for displaying themselves as sexual beings. It’s toweringly hypocritical, but also understandable in the sense that they’re desperate to protect a highly profitable product.
The photo we’ve shared below of Chaudieu showing off her body as well as her 10,000 megawatt smile didn’t come from her Lui layout but rather from one of the many later sessions she did after deciding to make a career of glamour modeling. She wasn’t the first Miss France to be dethroned because of nude pictures. In 1983 Isabelle Turpaultwas defrocked for photos published by Paris Match. And interestingly, Chaudieu’s replacement performed in hardcore porn under the name Tenessy after her reign as Miss France. Chaudieu had cinematic ambitions as well, but of the mainstream variety. She appeared in Gwendoline, aka The Perils of Gwendoline in the Land of the Yik Yak, but that was her only screen credit. After a few years posing for men’s magazines she disappeared from the public eye, and today a person who was once the most famous—or notorious—in France, doesn’t even have a French Wikipedia page.