I’ll start by answering a few of the questions you might otherwise find yourself googling during a late-night internet spiral. Gabbriette Bechtel (26 years old, Leo, 5’ 4”, based in LA) doesn’t have:
1. Famous parents.
2. Eyebrows (after she’s washed her make-up off).
3. Inhibitions.
The iconoclastic American model and Instagram chef, known simply as Gabbriette to those of us who are chronically online, does have:
1. A pet rat called Splinter.
2. A Mac Cosmetics lip liner in Stone in her battered black Gucci bag at all times.
3. An enormous black diamond engagement ring on her left hand to match her all-black uniform of 1990s Jil Sander and Tom Ford-era Gucci.
The ring comes courtesy of The 1975 frontman Matty Healy. In June, she announced her betrothal to him with a picture taken during a Charli XCX concert in New York. It was hardly a surprise. After all, haven’t we all fallen for Gabbriette this summer?
She has “It.” Which, in 2024, means she’s in possession of a self-deprecating sense of humor that some might label “unhinged”; a wardrobe of archival late-1990s clothes; and self-made success that attracts a sizable social media following. Gabbriette’s particular kind of “It” counters the narrative that life online has made our generation uncool and hung-up. And she loves eating. Bored during the pandemic, she posted an Instagram Reel of herself making her mom’s authentic Mexican ceviche. “She puts ketchup in it,” Bechtel says. “The internet is quick to tell you you’re holding your knife wrong. I had to learn fast because I didn’t like those comments. But the response was great, and I was like, Oh, people love it!”
In short, Bechtel is hot right now. In addition to campaigns for the likes of The Attico and Marc Jacobs, plus front-row appearances at Burberry, Saint Laurent, and Prada, she’s also one of the heroines of Brat summer. Its mastermind, Charli XCX (real name Charlotte Aitchison), is engaged to Healy’s bandmate George Daniel and has been a keen supporter of Bechtel ever since she booked her to play a zombie in one of her music videos in 2016. Bechtel is now so “It,” when making Brat, arguably the album of the summer, Charli looked to her for lyrical inspiration. The result? “360”—a track and accompanying music video that put a new-wave generation of women in the spotlight: among them the comedian and filmmaker Rachel Sennott; model and Gucci favorite Alex Consani; Vogue make-up artist Isamaya Ffrench—and Gabbriette.
In a post-Ozempic era, her recipe videos (think: home-cooked tarragon chicken, pumpkin-spiced olive oil cake, spring pea carbonara) remind young women, in particular, that cooking—and eating—unlocks sensuous pleasure. She may resemble a 1999 Golden Globes-era Angelina Jolie, but she’s greasing a skillet and showing us how to bake brownies with grain-free flour. “It’s just the way that I’m comfortable being on the internet,” she says of her forthright lens on life. “If I were super-composed and overthought everything, I would drive myself absolutely insane. That’s just not the way that I want to be put out or perceived.”
Not only can you eat and dress like Bechtel, but you can lip-sync like her, too. On the night of her New York engagement reveal, she was exactly where you’d hope a model of the moment would be: in the thick of the rave, dancing alongside two of her “360” costars, dominatrix-turned-author Julia Fox and model and photographer Richie Shazam, as the audience belted out the lyrics, “I’m your favorite reference, baby/Call me Gabbriette, you’re so inspired.”
A month earlier in London, on set with British Vogue at Notting Hill’s Buns From Home bakery, Bechtel had let slip about her forthcoming nuptials while kneading some laminated dough for the camera. (If you haven’t personally waited for one of its cinnamon rolls, it’s likely you’ve marveled at the sight of the queues on TikTok.) Should she dye her luminous blonde locks back to espresso brown to get married? She wondered aloud.
A few hours later, we made our way to The Cow on Westbourne Park Road to debrief in a quiet corner—though it’s not so easy for a viral Californian bombshell to go under-the-radar in a west London pub. The handsome waiter with the floppy hair waits for her order like his life depends on it; a local photographer who Gabbriette affectionately christens “Robbie” turns our “quiet drink” into a shoot. I’m imagining the tableau vivant—oyster, vape, and a Guinness clutched in her French manicured hands—as we strike a pose; Gabbriette whispers in my ear in a delighted Dickensian-British accent. “Babe, we got papped in The Cow.”
Raised in Laguna Beach by her Mexican mother and Swiss father, Bechtel—a talented ballerina—was a straight-F student who excelled at extracurricular theater. “I went to school in cheetah-fur coats and red lipstick, and then went home and would be on Tumblr,” she says of her teen years. These days, she’s rarely out of low-cut black trousers with flip flops or her vintage Cesare Paciotti dagger boots, plus her Blinde by Richard Walker 88 sunglasses, a big bag, and “crunchy blonde” hair. It’s very Mary-Kate Olsen. Bechtel, by the way, shops mostly on eBay, Mercari, and Grailed (because an It girl never overpays for vintage).
Recently, as a joke, she and her friends were reading Reddit posts for the topic “Does anyone know Gabbriette?” Someone had written, “I knew her in high school. She had no friends.” Bechtel says, “I don’t know who wrote that, because it was an anonymous username, but I was like, I didn’t know anyone noticed.”
The teenage Gabbriette, circa 2007, was aloof—quietly poring over Alexa Chung’s Francophile style and obsessing over Seventeen cover stars, including The Hills’s Lauren Conrad. She’d often flick through beauty trade magazines while folding foils for her hairdresser mother. “I was gothy Parisian meets Orange County,” she says. “I cut short bangs because I wanted to look like Joan Jett, or a trad-punk Jane Birkin in the ’80s.”
Her latest hairstyle—inspired by 1990s images of Gwyneth Paltrow posted to @Cabmate—was a marathon undertaking. It took Jesus Guerrero (hairstylist to Rosalía and Kylie Jenner) 19 hours across two days to bleach her raven lengths—and there’s been additional five-hour root touch-ups since. The look has a Madonna by Meisel ring to it (google the Versace spring/summer 1995 campaign), which she carries off with ease.
Gabbriette wasn’t always so comfortable in her own skin, but she was determined. She started modeling in her last year of school, appearing in an American Apparel ad. “I never got paid, but I was like, ‘Mom, Dad: I’m not going to college, because I’m going to be a model.’”
The modeling career she’d promised herself took off in the 2010s in New York. She worked at The Break, a Brooklyn vintage store where she also would spend most of her earnings, to subsidise a calendar of test shoots. Before long, Gabbriette (self-styled as a modern-day Anna Karina) landed Rihanna’s inaugural 2018 Savage X Fenty campaign, shot by Tyrone Lebon. Her dad flew in from California to see her billboard in Times Square. This season, you may have seen her on Alexander Wang’s comeback runway, crushing a sugar glass in the palm of her hands. Over the next few years, her tattoo collection—inspired in part by artist and model Jane Moseley—grew as her eyebrows rapidly diminished. (There is, by the way, one tattoo that she regrets: a design modeled on a The Cramps poster, which has a typo in it.)
Gabbriette kickstarted the skinny brow revival from her parents’ Laguna Beach bathroom in 2019, reaching for her mother’s tweezers after watching a ’90s rom-com (“something like Notting Hill”) in a bid to appear more womanly and less baby-faced. Amid a timeline of oversized, fluffy, and microbladed brows, portraits of Gabbriette exuded the screen-siren mystery of Greta Garbo. “I didn’t have the thick hair to be like Cara Delevingne or Bambi Northwood-Blyth,” she says. The answer was to lean wholeheartedly into what worked for her.
The same applies to her relationship with Healy. He calls from LA during the wire-thin eyebrows origin story. I pause the recording, the cute waiter with the floppy hair places an Aperol on the table. The couple are poised to move into their new Hollywood Hills home, complete with large kitchen island, where Bechtel can’t wait to test new recipes. It’s also a place where she one day hopes to gather with her family. “When I have kids, it’s going to be dinner every night—no phones—to celebrate the smaller things and recognize people’s happiness,” she says. There’s also a big backyard with lots of room for Splinter the rat, and closet space for her collection of late ’90s/early 2000s Margiela. The latest addition? An original spring/summer 1996 screen-printed dress that Healy gave to her for Christmas.
“I love being in love,” she says after she hangs up the phone to her fiancé. “When I thought that I was in love before it was just me being a person of service to somebody else.”
Her advice to anyone still looking? “Answer all your DMs and listen to your closest friends.” She smiles, as bewitching as ever. “When they like somebody, you should listen to them.”
Hair, Neil Moodie; makeup, Mathias van Hooff. Nails: Michelle Humphrey. Production: Diana Eastman. With thanks to Bronte Elsom, Ash Thompson, and buns from home