For model Iris Strubegger, it really started with the haircut.
A staple of the spring runways and the latest fashion magazines, Strubegger’s in-demand status can be traced back to the day she let hair maestro Didier Malige snip off her long locks and buzz the sides, leaving just enough hair on top to fashion a pompadour or a boyish side part.
It was with the slicked-down style—complimented by scarlet lips and piled-on Chanel—that Strubegger graced the cover of French Vogue last March. Shot by Mert Alas and Marcus Piggott, the Austrian-bred stunner has one hand in her pocket and a classic tweed jacket thrown over her shoulder. She appears powerful and sexy-tough, androgynous in an early-Nineties way. (In fact, Alas and Piggott’s image was an homage to a Steven Meisel Italian Vogue cover from 1992, which featured another gender-bending beauty, Kristen McMenamy.)
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“I was very nervous,” recalls Strubegger of prepping for the shoot. “My agency told me [my hair] was not going to be cut short-short-short, but, for me, it was quite short.” Days later, though, she was in love. Having a unique “look” boosted her confidence, she says, and, soon, her career. (“It’s sort of funky, but it can also be very elegant,” she says of her cut. “It’s very versatile, but it is for sure very androgynous.”)
“Now, people see me as a special character that they can work with,” Strubegger adds. “[People] needed something new. I mean, there’s so many girls with long, blonde hair.…Sometimes it’s also good to have some new inspiration and new ideas.”
If Strubegger sounds clued in to fashion’s ebbs and flows, it’s because she is. Scouted in 2002 while working as an au pair in New York, a then–18-year-old Strubegger enjoyed some success, including walking in a spring Calvin Klein show. But she abandoned the business after a year, returning to her native Salzburg, Austria, to enroll in university. “By the end of the year, I didn’t like [modeling] so much,” she explains. “People treat you like a product. It really upsets me, that they forget that is a human being behind the girl,” Strubegger later says of the industry’s dark side.
However, after four years of studying digital media, marketing and production (and writing a thesis on mobile marketing), she decided to give modeling a second chance.
To say Strubegger has been busy ever since would be an enormous understatement. She walked in 56 shows for spring 2010, opening Marc Jacobs, Dolce & Gabbana and Lanvin and closing Rodarte, Isaac Mizrahi and Bottega Veneta, among others. “Everything that happened last year is, like, really crazy,” she says. “I really enjoy [modeling] now.”
In addition to fall campaigns for Valentino and Givenchy, the 25-year-old has appeared on the covers of Vogue’s Japanese and Spanish editions this year, in editorials in such edgy magazines as Love, V and Hercules, as well as in French, Italian and American Vogue. Of her bold and oftentimes androgynous look in these images, the soft-spoken Strubegger says: “I like the little [bit] of role play, to be more, maybe, the tough girl or the guy. Or sometimes to just be a woman, very feminine and elegant. I like that.”