Seeing Red.(Coco Rocha's hair color)

Byline: Jonathan Van Meter. Photographed by Patrick Demarchelier.

In a characteristically bold move, Coco Rocha turns her back on being brunetteand returns to her roots.

Coco Rocha is a model who walks to every single appointment in New York, even when it's raining. She always has her nose in a book. Lately she's been reading a sappy historical romance called The Courtesan that she is a bit embarrassed about. When she's not shooting ad campaigns for Balenciaga, YSL, or Chanel, the 20-year-old Canadian likes to travel off the beaten path. Way off. Last summer she went to Botswana and Namibia. And in a couple of weeks she is planning on "running away" to Australia for two months to visit family and take her first real break from modeling in five years. "I need to remind myself why I do it," she says. "Do I love it? Or is it just something to do? If you see me in Australian VOGUE in a couple of months, you'll know that I couldn't stand it and had to get back to work."

But right now Coco is about to embark on a different kind of adventure. Sitting in a chair at the Louis Licari Salon on Fifth Avenue one Thursday morning in early November, she is about to have her shimmering dark-brown hair dyed a rich, coppery red. All eyes in the salon are on her, but none of the other clients seems to mind. Everyone gets caught up in the moment, charmed by the odd but thrilling spectacle of watching the fashion world's darling color her hair. Perhaps it has something to do with the fact that it is less than 48 hours after Barack Obama's glorious acceptance speech, and there is still a giddy sense of changefulness in the air.

Ever since she was photographed by Steven Meisel for Italian VOGUE in February 2006, Coco herself has been a welcome change in the fashion world: a girl with a lot of personality and no attitude. An accomplished Celtic dancer (she was discovered by the Canadian agent Charles Stuart at a dancing competition in Vancouver when she was fourteen), she famously thrilled Paris during the collections a few seasons ago when she did a rousing, stomping, high-kicking Irish jig for Jean Paul Gaultier's tartan show. While not quite possessing the household name and face of a supermodel, Coco nevertheless has distinguished herself with her ability to telegraph fierceness and innocence at the same time. Often photographed with a high ponytail and spooky makeup, she has more in common with sixties-era models Twiggy and Penelope Tree than she does with, say, Cindy Crawford; she's a cool insider favorite rather than an all-American phenomenon. As Coco puts it, "You're probably pretty fashion-savvy if you know who I am."

So why, when she has the kind of success most girls would kill for, would she go red? This seemingly renegade move turns out to be intrinsic to who Coco is. "I have a big group of friends from childhood who are all redheads," she explains. "And my mother is a redhead, and one of my friends' moms is a redhead. So they've all said that they were, as a group, a kind of family, and I was the adopted brown-haired girl." She laughs. "Now I get to go home and be a part of the family." Then recently, she did a shoot for Tokyo NumA[c]ro where she was required to don a red wig, and to her surprise everyone on set went bananas, telling her how fabulous she looked. She discussed the idea with Meisel, who "made" her career, as she likes to say, and then convinced her nervous agent at Elite, Micki Schneider, that it was inevitable. "Now is not the time for a change," he told her. But she was determined.

It is Licari's job to make sure she doesn't regret her decision. "When Coco came to see me," he says, "I was trying to figure out if she was reluctant at all, and she said, 'Noooo, this is my color! I am dying to be a redhead.' " Once he knew she was game, it was just a question of what kind of redhead she wanted to be. Was it Uma Thurman as Poison Ivy in Batman red? Or Nicole Kidman in Moulin Rouge! red? "We're going to do a natural red?" says Licari, a bit rhetorically, as his assistant Gus sets down three black bowls, each containing a different-color rinse. The two men begin to speak in codenumbers that correspond to the different colors. "Actually, what they're saying is 'I can't wait for lunch,' " says Coco, winking at me.