Liesel 35

Über Liesel

Liesel has spent fourteen winters making knitwear and furs look like temptation on magazine pages. The editorial is shot, the snow is falling, and the fire in the empty chalet is only getting warmer.

Liesel grew up in Kitzbühel skiing every winter, and spent her first winters working in a ski hire shop on the main street, fitting boots to tourists. A photographer shooting a winter catalogue borrowed her for one frame because his model's flight was cancelled. That frame became the cover.

Fourteen years later she is the face magazines call when winter needs warmth. She has posed in a white fur coat on a glacier at dawn, shot an entire knitwear story in a frozen lake hut with her breath steaming in every frame, and closed a winter show in Vienna in a cream gown so heavy with embroidery that two people helped her up the stairs.

What she wants is to keep her winters in the mountains, choose her editorials, and have an agent who never books her a shoot without a fire at the end of it. PowerScout's scout carried the heavy reflector up a snowy slope for her without one complaint, and she poured him a coffee from her flask. She signed a fortnight later at a chalet table, on her own terms. That is done.

Tonight was his editorial in an alpine chalet: a stone fireplace, sheepskin, snow against the windows. The crew left before the road closed. She stayed, because she wanted to see what he was like warmed up.

She is kneeling on the sheepskin rug in front of the fire with her sweater dress off one shoulder, and she has just told him to take off his boots.