This Is What a Riccardo Tisci Makeover Looks Like: Model Kris Gottschalk’s Powerful New Look

Kris Gottschalk made headlines this past July when she took her first ever catwalk turn on Public School’s menswear runway. As the only female model in the show, the German stunner with a newly shorn crop of spiky brown hair blended in as just one of the guys. Almost. (Damn those chiseled cheekbones and pouty, pillowy lips.)  It was an early career highlight that seemed hard to rival for the 23-year-old who had only just touched down in New York a few months earlier. Then she got a call from Givenchy.

“They had a lot of girls they knew they wanted [in the show] and there were only a few missing,” Gottschalk recalls of the final casting Riccardo Tisci held last week for Friday night’s show, which was dedicated to the anniversary of 9/11.  With the Joans and the Kendalls and the Mariacarlas already confirmed, Gottschalk walked for Tisci.

“He asked me to tell him the story about my hair,” she continues, detailing the spring that was spent in a Balinese hospital following a motorcycle accident that left her with a plate in her shoulder and a scar on her head from a severe concussion. An avid surfer, Gottschalk had gone to Thailand from Berlin for a meditation retreat when she flipped her bike. She wasn’t wearing a helmet.

“I was just so happy to be alive. I cut my hair when I got out of the hospital. It was a new beginning,” the natural brunette, who had been dying her long mane blonde for modeling gigs, explained to Tisci. The designer asked if she’d go shorter and consider changing the color; Gottschalk obliged and found herself at Pickthorn, the custom hair-painting atelier in Brooklyn’s Bushwick neighborhood the next day.

“I was in the salon for two hours and it was buzzed and bleached. It was easy,” she says of the transition that led to her striking womenswear debut in one of Tisci’s black lace confections. A quick pre-show brow bleaching courtesy of the makeup artist Pat McGrath only added to Gottschalk’s directional spin around Marina Abramovic’s Pier 26 set.

With three more weeks of Spring collections still to come, Gottschalk is feeling her new look. “I’m going to keep it for sure,” she says of the buzz cut, staying mum on where we’re likely to see her next. As for her bleached brows, the jury’s still out.

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