(Photo: Fabrizio Ferri)

Every day, impossibly gorgeous girls are plucked from midwestern malls and Russian cafés, Brazilian beaches and small Eastern European towns, and hustled to Manhattan. The burning hope is that theirs will become The Face, and its bearer the new belle of New York—and from here, the world. But this year’s Face belongs to a born-and-raised New Yorker. Meet Elettra Wiedemann: UNIS grad, “Democracy and Cultural Pluralism” major at a Manhattan college, and new Lancôme spokesmodel. As it happens, those cheekbones have a pedigree: This Face’s mother is Isabella Rossellini. So, is it strange to sashay in Mom’s footsteps? “There’s something lovely about it,” Wiedemann says. “It reinforces the idea of women passing knowledge from one generation to another.”

Related:

• Archive: “Fashion and Shopping”
• Articles by Amy Larocca
• Table of Contents: Dec 25, 2006 issue of New York | Subscribe!