all the right ANGLES; Short hair is back with a bang: strong signature looks tailored to flatter your face and pump up your personality.

Byline: Sarah Brown

Twenty-four-year-old Jacquetta Wheeler has been among the top of the top models for the last eight years, but this season, as New York Fashion Week unfolded, she found herself standing squarely at the pinnacle of that very pretty heap. Though Marc Jacobs's rich and regal reinvention of grunge made fashion followers pant with desire, what everyone was really talking about-backstage, in the front row, at parties all over town-was Wheeler.

A haircut can do that.

It happened like this: It was the end of a Vogue shoot, where Wheeler had tucked her long, back-grazing hair up into a short, bobbed platinum wig. Like virtually every other model, she'd spent the last few years growing her hair below her shoulders. It was pretty enough, but in a sea of long-haired blondes, she didn't stand out. "I knew something was wrong. She's a short-hair girl," says Julien d'Ys, the legendary French hairdresser known as much for his gravity-defying couture confections as for his own hair (lazy, sweeping sections that fold this way and that and end up hanging suspended, somehow, in midair). "I said to her, 'Call me when you want to cut.' She said, 'OK, let's cut.' " And so as everyone was packing up, d'Ys unsheathed his scissors, lopped off her ponytail in one fell swoop (he instinctively kept it), and went to work-though he admits he "didn't think," following the shape of her face, the lines of her bone structure: an aristocratic, aquiline nose, chiseled cheekbones, sharp chin. "It's like I'm painting," explains d'Ys, who is also an artist. "I don't know where I'm going."

"That's what I loved about what Julien did," says Wheeler, now sitting in a makeup chair in Patrick Demarchelier's Chelsea photo studio. "He did it as he went along-a little less volume here, more there, whatever my face needed."

The result: a mod yet unmistakably modern bob with haphazard bangs and longish, uneven pieces that fall over her ears, all easing into a textured wedge in the back (which makes Wheeler's already enviably long neck assume the graceful proportions of, say, a giraffe). It's messy yet precise, edgy while elegant, boyish but so very feminine-a sort of Beatles/Louise Brooks hybrid.

After what feels like an eternity of the same commitment-free, very long hair-the ubiquitous shades-of-blonde blow-outs-both on ...