ELLE Digital Cover Star: The Accidental Cool Of Kirandeep Chahal

There is a version of Kirandeep Chahal’s backstory that will hit close to home for many Indian women. To come from a family that cannot comprehend the desire for a life earned and lived on your own terms. To be expected to get married young, start a family, and follow a pre-written narrative folded neatly into the same shape it has always taken. Then there is the version she followed instead, one that eventually led her to becoming a familiar fixture on the runways of Dior, Dries Van Noten and Rick Owens, among other names that make fashion disciples starstruck.

Back in 2019, she was living in Bengaluru, a journalism student first, skipping a class or two to take up odd modelling gigs and pay her way through college. It seemed like a natural progression into a career as a journalist, writing politics for newspaper columns. But the Carrie Bradshaw dream rarely survives the realities of young writers, and Chahal soon began pivoting to her previous side quests. “I didn’t start modelling from ground level,” she says. “It was the basement, where nobody goes. Hundred outfit changes a day, catalogue shoots, anything random in between.”

She was diligently living this version of her life until the pandemic hit, when her mother asked her to return to her hometown in Ludhiana, Punjab. But Chahal possesses the sort of gutsy, slightly unhinged grit that makes logistical nightmares feel like casual afternoon errands. She is the kind of girl who will wrap up her entire college life and journalism career into a battered gold Maruti Ritz, throw in her two dogs, and drive 2404 kilometres solo across the country without so much as a nervous breakdown. “I know we do have options,” she laughs, “but sometimes I feel like I have no option but to do these things.” When she regales this pandemic solo road trip story, it feels like a neat summation of the kind of person Chahal is: gutsy, instinctive, and somehow still batting her pretty eyelashes while manoeuvring the emotional obstacle course of modern womanhood.

When I first met her in Paris during Fashion Week, somewhere between castings and the endless choreography of the city, she struck me as someone both entirely within fashion and strangely detached from its machinery. Perhaps that is why her story feels less like a conventional modelling trajectory.

Once upon a time, she had long jet-black locks. Today, her shaved head has become so synonymous with her image that it is difficult to imagine there was once a version of her desperately trying to perform a femininity she never quite recognised in herself. Before Paris, before the campaigns and castings, before girls started taking screenshots of her haircut to send to their hairstylists at 2 AM, Chahal was tired of being told what the industry wanted her to look like. So one day, she simply decided she had had enough of the modelling world and shaved it all off.  

“The typecasting came in both acting and modelling,” she says. “For acting, they would ask how long my hair was before booking a role. Everything became about how feminine you looked.” Then she pauses before grinning. “If I intellectualise it, it’ll sound very profound,” she says. “But lowkey? It was a Britney moment.” By late 2022, after stepping away from modelling for nearly eight months, she shaved her head on her birthday. The decision was emotionally loaded in ways she still struggles to articulate cleanly. “As a Sikh woman, you’re taught your hair is your pride,” she says. “I genuinely wondered if I had done something that would cut me off from God.”

But the regret never really took over. “The second I sat on that salon chair, I knew this was right,” she says. “Actually, my only regret was not doing it earlier.” Ironically, the haircut she assumed would end her modelling career became the very thing that altered it. In early 2023, scouts from Women Management arrived in India. Chahal walked into the meeting convinced nobody would want to book a girl with a freshly buzzed head. She was giving modelling a second chance. “Within a week, I was shipped to Paris,” she laughs. “And every show they made my hair even shorter. Everyone kept buzzing it more, and I loved that.” 

Her first major international booking was Dior’s Autumn/Winter 2023 show. Casual. One minute she was doing catalogue shoots in India, the next she was backstage at one of fashion’s most mythologised houses trying to comprehend the fact that this was now somehow her life. Soon after came Rick Owens, Dries Van Noten and the sort of Paris Fashion Week schedule that would make even seasoned models spiritually leave their bodies. “I’d barely travelled abroad before,” she says. “But weirdly, Paris felt natural to me. I think because I observe everything, so I don’t feel nervous.”

Having walked for Dries Van Noten’s last womenswear show, Chahal brings up poignant memories of being backstage in 2024. “Walking for Dries is always going to feel special because not even for one second did I feel that I didn’t belong or deserve to be there. As Indians, we sometimes are hardwired to question that about ourselves.” In a way, finding global validation first is what propelled her career closer to home. In India, she reserves that special spot for Sabyasachi, who brought her on board for campaigns, dressing her in bridal lehengas as a boyish waif, and seeing the kind of Indian femininity she represented. 

There is also something quietly radical about the way Chahal occupies space in fashion, particularly at a time when conversations around Indian representation globally are often flattened into aesthetics or algorithm-ready diversity rhetoric. When I ask her whether she ever thinks about the newer archetype of the “global Indian model”, the ambassador, the face, the culturally exportable version of beauty that luxury brands increasingly gravitate towards, she shrugs it off almost immediately.

“That ship kind of sailed for me before it even arrived,” she says, laughing. “I don’t really look like what people imagine an Indian model should look like. My hair is not the typical Indian hair people look for, my face doesn’t read traditionally Indian abroad… so I could never really lean into that.” Instead, what has distinguished her is her personality. Or perhaps her refusal to make herself marketable through neat identity politics. 

“You shouldn’t be the face of something despite of who you are,” she says. “You should be the face of something because of who you are.” Still, her relationship with visibility remains deeply complicated, particularly after discovering she had alopecia alongside a broader autoimmune condition that forced her away from work for almost a year.

“I was very sick,” she says simply. “And the steroids made me gain weight. I had to disappear for a while.” The alopecia itself was something she had unknowingly lived with for years. “I found out I had alopecia after a hairstylist pointed out the bald patches. And once you shave your head, there’s no hiding it. Suddenly, it’s just cheetah patches everywhere,” she reveals. 

Yet the visibility of her condition unexpectedly opened up private conversations with women across the country. Women quietly began messaging her about hair loss, femininity, shame, and medical conditions they had never spoken about publicly before. “There are so many women dealing with this stuff silently,” she says. “I realised I could either hide from it or just be honest.” That honesty now informs the way she speaks about the industry itself. Particularly, for younger girls entering modelling spaces with no protection or guidance. “Right now, it’s a great movement that is happening,” she says, referring to models in India beginning to speak more openly about their experiences. “I want the girls on the first day at the job or her first show to come back and say, ‘I really want to continue doing this,’ instead of saying, ‘I would never want to do this again,’” she says, remembering her entry into the industry. “That will be the goal of my generation.”

There is also very little illusion in the way Chahal speaks about modelling. Despite all its mythology, she understands the industry’s shelf life better than most people entering it. “In India, modelling still isn’t fully treated like a legitimate profession,” she says. Chahal admits there were multiple moments throughout her career where she nearly walked away from modelling entirely after difficult experiences on set or backstage. “There have been many times when I have done a show, and certain situations have happened where I’ve gone back and considered never modelling again,” she admits. How would she overcome it? “Never filter your thoughts,” she continues. “I would tell everybody coming up: always tell your truth.”

Her idea of change is refreshingly unspectacular, but rooted in reality.  “Please study,” she says firmly. “Never stop educating yourself. Don’t leave college midway, thinking modelling is enough.” She speaks repeatedly about the importance of building a life outside fashion, whether that means writing, learning new skills, or simply allowing yourself an identity beyond your face and body. 

“I need multiple things happening in my life to stay mentally healthy,” she says. “Modelling can’t be the only thing feeding your brain.” During her hiatus while she was recuperating from her treatments, she learnt how to DJ. Oddly enough, one of the funniest stories she tells me arrives during this same period of illness. After temporarily stepping away from modelling, she flew to Thailand to recover and decompress, fully convinced she was done with fashion for a while. Then her agents called. “Hermès wants to book you directly.” She practically screams while recalling it.

“I had only packed flip-flops and summer clothes because I was in Thailand relaxing,” she laughs. “Suddenly I’m on a business class flight to freezing Paris with literally no winter clothes.” She landed and went directly from the airport to a fitting. “I wrapped myself in the hotel blanket because I had nothing warm,” she says. “I looked insane.”

The story feels strangely emblematic of her entire career: glamorous by accident rather than calculation. Every time she threatens to leave modelling behind, fashion seems to drag her back in by the sleeve like a toxic ex with excellent taste.

And maybe that’s the thing about Kirandeep Chahal. She never entered fashion, trying to become an archetype. Not the cool desi baddie, not the diversity hire, not the perfectly media-trained luxury darling. She simply arrived as herself: shaved head, copious amounts of chutzpah, still somehow holding on to the girl who drove a battered Maruti Ritz across the country, and made the industry rearrange itself around that instead.

Team Credits

Editorial Director: Ainee Nizami Ahmedi; Photographer: Noémi Ottilia Szabo; Jr Fashion Stylist: Tejashree Raul; Jr Graphic Designer: Aditi Magesh; HMUA: Claire Gil; rep by Anima Creatives; Words by: Shriya Zamindar; Bookings Editor: Rishith Shetty; Production: Rose Merchandier at Studio KIKI Prod; Artist Management: Purple Thoughts; Assisted by: Rasikka Deorey (bookings)