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.
