On the other side of the planet, Gabbriette Bechtel has been awake for hours. The model and influencer, known mononymously as Gabbriette, is in Australia shooting a movie, adjusting to the time difference, and trying to fit in time to catch up with her family group chat. (When I warn her that the jet lag is even worse on the way back, she deadpans, “Cool. Thank you.”)
You can certainly forgive Bechtel if she’s a little wiped at the moment; 2024 has been very much her year. The 27-year-old got a shout-out in Charli XCX’s “360” as the blueprint for “brat” style, appeared in the song’s tongue-in-cheek music video, fronted campaigns for Marc Jacobs, released a makeup collaboration with M.A.C, and got engaged to Matty Healy, the frontman of The 1975. And it’s only October.
She used to arrive on set, she says, ready to inhabit whatever character the photographer and stylist had in mind. Now, her persona precedes her. “A lot of it is becoming more about my taste, my personality, and it’s really nice that people want to get my opinion,” she says, casually dressed in a black St. Agni T-shirt and low-slung black pants. Her black diamond engagement ring flashes on her hand, and her arms are encircled with tattoos: a butterfly, a sunburst.
For her shoot in ELLE’s November issue, she worked with photographer Cameron McCool and ELLE Fashion Director Alex White, providing her own input as they conjured the story of a girl she describes as follows: “She’s kind of sad. She’s in a hotel, waiting for the phone to ring, watching TV. She’s missing her boyfriend back home. She’s just in a mood—and she has nice clothes.” Bechtel’s own personal style—which has been described as rock-chick, grunge, and ’90s-inspired, complete with ultra-skinny eyebrows and nude lips—fed into the look of the Hollywood newcomer she plays here, even if she is hardly waiting for any phones to ring these days.
Bechtel recently got a Pinterest account, “so now keywords come into my mind,” she says, but her aesthetic is hard to reduce to search terms. “I guess people can put a ’90s label on it.” “Maybe it’s my eyebrows, or my makeup. It’s hard to label yourself.” When she first moved to L.A., “the easiest thing for me to buy was the cheapest pair of leather pants from the thrift store, so that I could destroy them and wear them every single day.” She kept a trunk of clothes in the apartment where she lived with her first boyfriend, channeling the look of Joan Jett, Siouxsie Sioux, “and all those leather-mommy musicians.” With the exception of gifted items, she still rarely wears brand-new pieces, preferring the patina of secondhand clothes. Growing up in Orange County, where her classmates favored what she calls “bright, colorful, neon Coachella clothing,” Bechtel trawled Tumblr for pictures of Alexa Chung and Sky Ferreira, adopting their bangs and winged eyeliner. “I never went to school with a bikini top, and shorts, and Uggs on—because I couldn’t afford Uggs,” she says, laughing.
Today, Bechtel is the 2024 Chung or Ferreira for thousands of indie girls, as codified on the bars of Brat. Charli gave her a heads-up text months before the song came out. “And it was such a sly text,” Bechtel says. “She was like, ‘Hey, LOL, can I maybe put your name in this song?’ (The two go way back—Bechtel appeared in one of Charli’s music videos, and the pop star then hand-picked her to be the lead singer of the punk band Nasty Cherry, whose quest for rock stardom was chronicled in its own Netflix documentary.) Bechtel moved into a house with a group of girls she’d never met, a time she looks back on fondly. “Anytime somebody brings it up to me, I just start smiling. It was the best and weirdest five months of my life.”
She describes the set of the “360” music video, in which she appeared with Julia Fox and Chloë Sevigny, as “so fun.” Adopting Charli’s British accent, she mimics her directions: “‘You’re pushing a dead man through a hallway.’ It was like, no questions asked.” When the video came out, Bechtel’s mother called her and said, using her birth name, ‘Gabriella, I’m listening to this song, and do you know Charli put your name in it?’ I was like, ‘Mom, that’s why I’m in the music video.’ And she was like, ‘I hope you sent her flowers.’” (Reader, she did.) Since the video came out, Bechtel has seen an uptick in girls approaching her on the street to say they love her style, which she credits to the name-check. “I credit a lot of things to Charli.”
While Nasty Cherry has disbanded, Bechtel is still open to pursuing music again. “I’m killer at karaoke,” where her favorites include Avril Lavigne, No Doubt, and a “screamo” version of Madonna, she says, “so if anyone wants to turn me into a pop star, I’m here.” She jokes of her conversations with her fiancé, “I’m like, ‘Matty, do you want to turn me into a pop star?’ He’s like, ‘It’s a lot more than that.’ I’m like, ‘But you have so many talented girls on your label, just put me on there.’ And he’s like, ‘Yeah, because they write all their music, like beabadoobee. They’re all musicians.’”
“But for now,” she says, “it’s acting and cooking.” Growing up, she spent lots of time in the kitchen with her parents learning family recipes; her father is Swiss and her mother is Mexican. “I can spend literally five hours on food Instagram, just scrolling,” she says. During lockdown, she started sharing cooking videos on her social media, beginning with her mom’s ceviche, and recently collaborated with buzzy L.A. café chain Great White on an ink-black burger and spritz cocktail. When she’s home, her parents tease, “Where’s the chef now?” but they have been supportive of the endeavor. “They’ve never spit out my food,” she jokes.
She’s still cooking on camera, but “I don’t like being in the videos anymore. I don’t know if anyone has noticed, but I just show the food,” she says. “They’re easier to edit. I don’t have to get dressed…It is about the food. It’s not really about my outfit.” Next up for her is a cookbook that she hopes to release next summer; she’s reluctant to share details about the theme, but envisions it as an art book with recipes, “a nice coffee table book that you can rip apart.” You won’t see any pictures of her there, either: “it’s not a ‘holding up a meatloaf’ kind of situation.”
She appreciates being on set with peers like Alex Consani and Ashley Graham, who also have a lot going on off-set. “Some people really do think models are models, and ‘shut up and put the outfit on,’” she says, “but it is inspiring to know that people can tackle so much.”
She’s currently filming I Never Forget What You Did Last Summer, the newest installment of the beloved ’90s franchise, with Chase Sui Wonders, Madelyn Cline, and Sarah Pidgeon. She says it’s “like playing pretend for hours with really cool people.” Acting is definitely something she wants to explore further. “If they do a Suzi Quatro anything, I’ll do it. I don’t think I could do the Britney Spears movie; I don’t think I’m pop enough,” she says. “My favorite movies are the first Crow and Queen of the Damned, and I like really shit sci-fi. I have a list of movies that have [a] 20 percent [rating] on Rotten Tomatoes.” She would love to appear in a sci-fi or action blockbuster, “something where I’m getting chased.”
She is enjoying letting the world get to know her in all her facets. Back in her Tumblr days, “nobody was really speaking and it was just like, ‘What? How are they so beautiful, and what’s going on?’ Everything was such a mystery. I like that things are overexposed now.” And if she craves a little more anonymity, it’s just a drive down the 405 away. “When I go home to Orange County,” she says, “nobody gives a fuck who I am, so it’s fine.”
Hair by Teddy Charles at Nevermind Agency; makeup by Holly Silius for M.A.C Cosmetics; manicure by Jolene Brodeur at The Wall Group; set design by Ali Gallagher at 11th House Agency; produced by Dana Brockman at viewfinders.
This shoot appears in the November 2024 issue of ELLE.
