A few months ago, Matt Healy proposed to his girlfriend of less than a year, a woman who goes by Gabbriette Bechtel. She’s a model, muse and internet personality. She seems to be involved in music as well. I thought she had the look and vibe of someone who was raised outside of America, but no, she’s a California girl who grew up in Laguna Beach and desperately wanted to be Parisian and goth-arty. I get that, honestly. Gabbriette is getting so much attention now that she’s engaged to Healy, so much so that British Vogue recently did a huge profile of her. They’re calling her the It Girl of 2024 or something. All of this because she’s engaged to Healy, right? Some highlights from British Vogue:

Biographical details: Gabbriette Bechtel (26 years old, Leo, 5ft 4in, based in LA) doesn’t have: 1. Famous parents. 2. Eyebrows (after she’s washed her make-up off). 3. Inhibitions.

Gabbriette is part of Brat Summer: She’s also one of the heroines of Brat summer. Its mastermind, Charli XCX (real name Charlotte Aitchison), is engaged to Healy’s bandmate George Daniel and has been a keen supporter of Bechtel ever since she booked her to play a zombie in one of her music videos in 2016. Bechtel is now so “It”, when making Brat, arguably the album of the summer, Charli looked to her for lyrical inspiration. The result? “360” – a track and accompanying music video that put a new-wave generation of women in the spotlight: among them the comedian and filmmaker Rachel Sennott; model and Gucci favourite Alex Consani; Vogue make-up artist Isamaya Ffrench – and Gabbriette.

She does cooking videos on Instagram: “It’s just the way that I’m comfortable being on the internet. If I were super-composed and overthought everything, I would drive myself absolutely insane. That’s just not the way that I want to be put out or perceived.”

Her teen years: Raised in Laguna Beach by her Mexican mother and Swiss father, Bechtel – a talented ballerina – was a straight F student who excelled at extracurricular theatre. “I went to school in cheetah-fur coats and red lipstick, and then went home and would be on Tumblr.” The teenage Gabbriette, circa 2007, was aloof – quietly poring over Alexa Chung’s Francophile style and obsessing over Seventeen cover stars, including The Hills’s Lauren Conrad. She’d often flick through beauty trade magazines while folding foils for her hairdresser mother. “I was gothy Parisian meets Orange County. I cut short bangs because I wanted to look like Joan Jett, or a trad punk Jane Birkin in the ’80s.”

She’s bringing back skinny brows: Gabbriette kickstarted the skinny brow revival from her parents’ Laguna Beach bathroom in 2019, reaching for her mother’s tweezers after watching a ’90s romcom (“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.

Her relationship with Healy: 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 recognise 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.

She loves love: “I love being in love,” she says after she hangs up the phone to her fiancé. “When I thought that I was in love before it was just me being a person of service to somebody else.”

[From British Vogue]

I enjoyed this? She seems fun. Obviously, there’s tons of material here which made me roll my eyes, but she’s actually putting this sh-t out here with a straight face, or at least that’s how I perceive her. She managed to sit down with British Vogue and still remain largely mysterious. Of course, I think the mystery is actually that she’s not that deep as a person. She’s just hyper-focused on aesthetics, or as we used to say, deep as a puddle.

Photos courtesy of Backgrid, Gabbriette’s IG.