Li Xiao Xing - Chinoise - 1m77 - 80/56/86
Agences
Elite
Women NY
Vogue Brésil
Septembre 2016
Zee Nunes
Vogue Chine
Août 2016
Ben Hasset
Li Xiao Xing : One of the 2 winners of Elite Model Look China 2011
AGE: 26 NATIONALITY: Chinese RÉSUMÉ: Since winning Elite’s televised Model Look contest in 2011, Xiao Xing has walked for the likes of Stella McCartney, Versace, Marc Jacobs and Fendi INSTAGRAM: @lixiaoxing_li I GREW TO LOVE FASHION... When I was young, I had short hair and wouldn’t wear dresses – I was a tomboy. My style is still laid-back, but it’s a bit chicer now [she’s not kidding; Xiao Xing arrived at The EDIT’s shoot in Marni and Kenzo]. I CAN BE A REBEL... My mother wouldn’t let me start modeling until I finished college, so my sister helped me to sneak out to enter the Elite Model Look competition. My mom soon found out when I won and was on television, but she was so proud of me. CHANGE IS GOOD... I recently bleached my hair after a shoot in which I wore a blond wig and loved how it looked on me. I like mixing things up and the industry has responded really well to it – Alexander Wang saw it and wanted me to walk for his FW16 show. THE BEST THING ABOUT MY JOB IS... You never know where your next stop is. My first campaign job was in Iceland and the experience will stay with me forever; it’s such an unbelievable place. IT’S FUNNY... My name means ‘morning star’, as I was born at 2am, but I am not a morning person! I find it so hard to wake up. In fact, my friends call me ‘Panda’ because I love to sleep and eat.
By Kristi Garced Do blondes have more . . . luck? Li Xiao Xing might say so. She dyed her hair platinum before the fall RTW season, and Versace, Fendi, Carolina Herrera and Alexander Wang all booked her. “I never did shows like that before; I guess because of my hair. But I didn’t change my face at all.” Turns out she and model Fernanda Ly, known for her long pink locks, have the same hairdresser. “That colorist is changing two girls’ careers,” Xiao Xing said. “But it’s good that they didn’t dye my hair pink.” How did you get started? I was a winner of the Elite Model Look competition in China when I was 21. I was in university at the time. This girl saw me on the street and said, “Hey, maybe you can be a model.” Because I was tall. But I refused it. I went home, but my mom said, “No way.” Because to her, I’m not really a Chinese beauty. In China, [beautiful girls] are like dolls. They have big eyes — like baby girls. So I’m like a monster to them. My mom would see magazines and TV commercials, and the models are all dolls. She was like, “No, this is not going to work for you.” How did your career end up taking off, then? I did a casting for Beijing Fashion Week and nobody picked me. Nobody even looked at me. They were probably like, “Oh, she’s so ugly.” So my mom was like, “See? I told you!” But the Elite Model agency sent my picture to Paris. The agency in Paris wanted me. After I won the Elite Model Look, my picture was everywhere. I left home for four months for the modeling competition. I had to lie to my mom because otherwise I wouldn’t have been able to do it. My sister was helping me lie. This was my only chance and I wanted to give it a try. Growing up in China, what were you into? I never thought I could be a model. I was a sporty girl. I used to play football with boys all the time. I never had long hair when I was young. I have a sister two years older than me and she is so beautiful. We have the same parents and we look so different. She wanted to be a model. She’s so girly, always in dresses. She always stole my mom’s high heels and makeup. We always fight. We love each other, but we fight. If you weren’t a model, what do you think you’d be doing? I could be a cleaning lady, maybe [laughs]. You know, my dream job was to be a teacher. But my mom always said, “Little kids, you would drive them crazy!” I only like little kids, not older kids. They’re boring.
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. In fact, from a front row perch, those flaxen strands seemed to be everywhere—tucked under a pink knit beanie at Alexander Wang, or gelled into finger waves at Marc Jacobs. “It felt like a dream,” she recalls of the way Wang himself fitted the cap on her head, or learning to stride in Jacobs’s 6-inch goth stompers. That whirlwind month secured her status as a rising model of the moment and taught her how to own an eye-catching color. Watching Li pull her glossy lengths loose from a high ponytail and toss them idly from side to side, it was hard to believe she had ever been without it. “Now, I don’t feel like this is bleached hair,” she says. “I feel like it’s mine.” Fortunately, for upkeep, her mantra is simple. “If I don’t work, I don’t wash,” she says of her conditioner-focused regimen—which includes boosting Christophe Robin’s prickly pear mask with a few drops of Rodin oil twice a week and doing little else. “You have to stay away from products with alcohol,” she adds. That minimal approach frees up time for Li to pursue her side hustle, as a self-taught skin-care expert—more important now than ever, given the way platinum tones highlight every flaw in the complexion. “Normally girls like to go out shopping or to get coffee, but when I’m free, my favorite thing is to spend time in my bathroom,” Li says, laughing. “For hours! I do my nails, I spend a lot of time on masks, you know.” Every one or two weeks, she pores through the shelves at Sephora or Barneys New York and stops by Ichimi Cosme, a hole-in-the-wall Asian beauty shop in the East Village. There, she stocks up on mask packs and serums, based off seasonal skin type tests at Ling Skin Care, her go-to facial spot in Union Square—for instance, her summer selection of products, below. “I change everything completely from summer to winter,” she says. “I spend a lot of money on this—but I need it!” Spoken like a die-hard beauty guru in the making.
FINAL SHOWLIST: Fall/Winter 2016 Opened: 0 | Closed: 0 Total Shows: 13 New York: 6 1. Alexander Wang 2. Brandon Maxwell 3. Carolina Herrera 4. DKNY 5. Marc Jacobs 6. Tom Ford London: 0 -skipped- Milan: 5 1. Bottega Veneta 2. Fausto Puglisi 3. Fendi 4. Philipp Plein 5. Versace Paris: 2 1. Redemption 2. Stella McCartney