Dutch model Imaan Hammam exudes a certain “who’s that girl?” quality, which comes with the territory when you book a Givenchy exclusive in Paris; the seventeen-year-old stunner walked Riccardo Tisci’s spring 2014 runway last fall, marking a Fashion Week rite of passage that also launched the careers of Joan Smalls and Lara Stone. Since then, we’ve come down with a serious case of hair envy, openly stalking Hammam’s long, thick, dark curls on Instagram (@hammamimaan). “My mom is from Morocco—from the South, where people are much darker, and have [textured] hair, and my father is from Egypt. He doesn’t have any hair lately, but in his younger years, he had a big Afro,” Hammam jokes of the genetic pairing that has yielded her own signature strands (which editorial pro James Pecis recently teased into a sexy, steamy cloud for the January issue of Vogue).
“I like to leave it natural most of the time,” she says of rarely straightening her hair, unless given good reason—like, say, for Calvin Klein Collection’s recent pre-fall show, where (spoiler alert) it looked just as good worn sleek, ironed, and center-parted for the runway.
A sworn believer in argan oil, which she regularly layers with Aunt Jackie’s Curl La La Defining Curl Custard, Hammam embraces a broader beauty sensibility that favors ease over fussiness. “I don’t use a lot of makeup,” says the Amsterdam-born fashion student who sticks to “Max Factor mascara”, “a lot of Eos lip balm,” and lets her hair do the rest of the proverbial talking.
Still, she says she could be talked into a transformative trim by the right backstage hairstylist. “I wore a very short wig for [a recent shoot], and I looked in the mirror and I thought, This is kind of beautiful!,” she admits. With a full month of fashion shows just around the corner, anything can happen.
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