Vogue.com
When Li Xiao Xing stepped into the Vogue.com offices last week, clad in slick denim and color-blocked Jacquemus, a row of heads literally turned to follow her down the hall. Though the Chinese model’s long, lean frame and razor-sharp cheekbones are admittedly hard to miss, it was, almost certainly, the river of baby blonde hair falling down her back that generated the whiplash effect.
It’s been six months since the Hebei native booked her first double process, after an agent spotted her at a costume party in a platinum wig. Struck by the way it made her almost feline features pop, he begged her to give the look a try ahead of the Fall 2016 shows. “I was like, seriously? That was just a wig I can take off and go home,” she tells me, shaking a hand through her roots. “But he knows that I’m a bit of a crazy girl, so he told me to think of it as a challenge—so I did it.” At the Suite Caroline salon under Lena Ott’s expert hand (the colorist now responsible for maintaining model Fernanda Ly’s bubblegum pink), Li doused her head in burning bleach over the course of 10 hours (“Four times, I remember, I was really dying”) and emerged with a game-changing look that soon catapulted her to the top of casting lists for the oncoming runway season.
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