This Model’s Transformation From Blonde to Brunette Landed Her a Spot on the Coolest New York Runway

While some may say 27-year-old Camilla Deterre defies categorization, perhaps it’s that she simply belongs to too many tribes: She’s a born-and-bred New Yorker; model and muse to Eckhaus Latta (or, as Mike Eckhaus and Zoe Latta recently dubbed her, their “dove”); the interior designer behind Tribeca hot spot Primo’s and the West Village bistro Mimi; and an artist whose first solo show is opening next weekend at the Chinatown gallery Larrie. But one thing she is decidedly not? “I never really identified as this long blonde-haired girl,” Deterre says backstage at Maryam Nassir Zadeh, less than 24 hours after dyeing her ear-skimming bleached lengths, which she hacked off on a whim last year, a rich cranberry brown shade.

“I was sick of that ‘beechy vibe,’” she adds, recalling the false sub-types that are so often attached to blonde-haired people (blonde bombshells, dumb blondes, either way they’re having more fun). And so she took to Instagram to poll her 29,000-plus followers. “Eighty percent said, ‘No, don’t do it.’ But that made me want to do it more,” she says. With a reference image of Jane Birkin “age 43” in hand, Deterre sat down in the chair of her longtime colorist, Marie Robinson Salon’s Cassandra Cuccia, and instructed her to go “dark, dark, dark.” “She’s the blonde queen, but it turns out she can do brunette, too,” says Deterre of the result, which she plans to maintain with Christophe Robin’s color-enhancing Shade Variation Mask in warm chestnut.

And while Deterre may still be getting used to it—“It feels like Barbie hair, like it doesn’t belong to me,” she says, anxious for her freshly darkened lengths to get some “wear and tear”—the hue has already begun to work in her favor. “When Maryam saw it on Instagram last night, she called me and asked if I would walk in the show today,” says the model, who is dressed in the hickory-hued suit from the designer’s Spring 2019 collection, a look that falls directly in line with her recently adopted mantra of “darker colors and more serious shit.” As she perks up to take her place in line—a chocolate confection in a sea of the season’s fluorescent pops and pretty pastels—one can’t help but think of the caption Deterre chose when sharing her new look: “Guess I hate fun.” And with that, she steps out onto the runway, a sly smile stamped across her face.

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