She appeared in a short skirt and blue bra, a pale pink teddy bear backpack slung over her shoulders. It was twenty-five years ago, on April 26, 2001. Loana Petrucciani made her entrance into “Loft Story,” the first French reality television show, launched on M6, a program that would soon be debated, analyzed, and criticized in countless articles and opinion pieces.
Loana would discover the scale of the phenomenon on July 5th, emerging as the winner of the show alongside Christophe, the other candidate favored by the public through a flurry of premium text message votes. The “couple” elected by viewers paraded down the Champs-Élysées, seated on the doors of a car ascending the avenue amidst the cheers of onlookers and a swarm of cameras and photographers. The show quickly became a cultural touchstone, launching a novel era of reality television in France.
After being confined for ten weeks in the “Loft” in Saint-Denis, her every move scrutinized by around thirty cameras, she suddenly became aware of her immense fame. Weeks later, she posed for Jean-Baptiste Mondino on the cover of Elle, with the headline “Loana, why we love her.”
She thought she was entering a dating show
Yet, when she entered the show’s set, the young woman had no dreams of glory. She would later say repeatedly in interviews: she was there to locate love, perhaps, thinking she was participating in something akin to a dating game show. That’s how the channel’s press release presented the concept of the show: “somewhere between Friends, The Dating Game and Real World, the first real sitcom developed by MTV.” But that’s too many influences to hold it together.
“Loft Story” was primarily a derivative of “Big Brother,” the seminal format created in the Netherlands, of what would later be called “confinement reality television.” In other words, filming a dozen candidates in isolation, cut off from the world, and seeing what happens. Loana, like her colleagues Steevy, Kenza, Julie and others, broke new ground – literally, the sets were completed just hours before the first live broadcast – and had no idea of the adventure they were embarking on.
“I didn’t know it was like that”
“I see now the back, the people with the cameras. At the time, I wasn’t so concerned about all of that, but there was a machine! I didn’t know it was like that,” Loana told Voici in 2024, upon the release of the series Culte dedicated to the behind-the-scenes of “Loft Story.”
In 2001, the press release sent to the media spoke of “real people” confined to “live a unique experience, test their ability to communicate, to seduce and try to meet the ideal partner.” And it qualified this as “real fiction,” an oxymoron that did not hide the fact that what was shown was a biased reality, constrained by production choices and decisions of viewers called upon to vote each week to save or exclude candidates.
Introverted and shy go-go dancer
Each candidate embodied, unwittingly, an archetype. Steevy was the gay man, Laure the Parisian bourgeois, Philippe the somewhat stuffy intellectual… Loana, she was the vulnerable bimbo. The portrait dedicated to her at the launch of the show on M6 showed her dancing in a string and bra on a nightclub stage. The young woman described herself as “introverted and shy,” explaining that she became a go-go dancer because, when she was 17, her mother was hospitalized, and she had to find a way to “build ends meet,” burying her desire to “pursue higher education.”
Then there was the famous “pool scene.” Loana flirted in the water with Jean-Edouard, for whom she had developed feelings. Did they have sex at that moment? It doesn’t matter, the sequence ignited the public, the media, and the “Loft” took on another dimension. It was then thought that French television had reached the height of voyeurism.
Her image in the media
In the days that followed, Jean-Edouard behaved like a brute with her, rejecting her. Viewers sympathized with and empathized with Loana. A few days later, Paris Match revealed the existence of Loana’s daughter, who had been placed in foster care. A part of France then felt legitimate in judging her.
This episode was the first act of her troubles with the media, which, in the years that followed, would be as capable of celebrating her ( Elle would dedicate a new cover to her in 2018, evoking “her rebirth after her descent into hell”) as of reveling in the dark moments she had to go through.
“People have the image of Loana today, to whom extremely complicated things have happened recently, and then they remember the pool but not the rest. They don’t remember where she comes from, the journey she took during the ‘Loft’ to regain control,” Nicolas Slomka, co-creator of the series Culte, told 20 Minutes two years ago. “We end on a glimpse of the after-“Loft” for her, which is that of a businesswoman who has taken control of her destiny. We wanted to recall and show that.”
Behind the phenomenon, a woman
“Did ‘Loft Story’ give a distorted image of who Loana Petrucciani really was?” The main interested party often repeated that no. “The Loana in the magazines is a fragile and strong young woman at the same time. That’s exactly me. People got to know me as I am and the portraits that are made of me are faithful to reality,” she declared in 2021 to La Revue des médias.
As tributes pour in following the announcement of her death at the age of 48, it is perhaps Benjamin Castaldi who best sums up the way “Loft Story” shaped the last twenty-five years of Loana’s life.
“She wasn’t a character. She was a woman. A real one. With her cracks, her sweetness, her fragility laid bare. And that’s precisely why we loved her. But that’s also why we let her down,” the host wrote on Instagram on Wednesday. “The truth is, we are all a little responsible. Because we all watched. Because we all commented. Because we all, at some point, looked away when it got too hard. […] Maybe we forgot, along the way, the essential: Behind the phenomenon… there was a woman.” The collective voyeurism was blinded, forgetting that reality is not fiction.
