On a Monday afternoon in March, Alysa Liu navigated the corridors surrounding the ice rink at Rockefeller Center with her skates anchoring her five-foot-three frame. Tilting her ankles slightly outward, she stomped across the terrazzo floors. In her wake, bystanders broke into spontaneous applause. It was the kind of involuntary reaction reserved for freed political prisoners, first responders, and, as it turned out, a punky-haired sports star who had just become the first American woman to win Olympic figure skating gold in 24 years.

Minutes earlier, an overzealous fan had attempted to ambush Liu in the locker room. The day before, she’d had her first brush with the paparazzi. “Initially, I thought it was funny. And then today it happened again—less funny,” she said. “They were kind of shady. They roasted me.” But just as the 20-year-old sensation had appeared inured to pressure in Milan while racking up a winning score of 226.79, her personal best, Liu was once again largely unfazed by the followers who have now become a feature of her daily life.

“I actually don’t want to be famous,” Liu told me matter-of-factly. Seated on a nondescript sofa in a private office tucked away from curious onlookers, she had changed out of her work uniform and into sweatpants and Uggs. She joked that her mane, dyed in a pattern resembling that of a ring-tailed lemur, had been that way “since birth.” Flashing a smile to reveal her mouth piercing, a small horseshoe-shaped barbell that hangs over her two front teeth, she added: “Unfortunately, the things I like to do are just going to make me famous.”

Indeed, being responsible for one of the most unlikely comebacks in the history of the Winter Games has proven more dizzying than any triple-triple. Since February, she has tasted an edible gold medal made of Lucky Charms with Al Roker on the Today show (a bowl of the cereal’s colorful marshmallows is currently her profile picture on Instagram, where her followers have jumped from a few hundred thousand to more than 8 million since the Olympics); sat front row at Nicolas Ghesquière’s fall/winter 2026 show for Louis Vuitton in Paris, clad in a brown denim jacket and matching baggy jeans; and presented Taylor Swift with the Artist of the Year award at the iHeartRadio Music Awards. The New York Times crowned her “the new face of her sport,” adding that her “effervescence intoxicates arenas, wafts through screens, and infects millions of viewers.”

But it goes further than that. More than just a trending figure skater, Liu has emerged as a new kind of pop culture figure entirely: an iconoclast who has won over the worlds of dance, music, fashion, and art by simply being herself. “I just have so many ideas I want to get out there,” she said. “Podium finishes aren’t really part of that.”

Liu is the eldest of five children, raised in Oakland, California, by their single father, Arthur Liu, a lawyer who built his family through anonymous egg donors and surrogacy. He started her at figure skating when she was 5, hoping to make her into a medalist. At 12, Liu became the youngest American to land a triple Axel in international competition; at 13, the youngest U.S. champion in the history of competitive skating; and at 14, the first American in women’s figure skating ever to land a quadruple Lutz.

She participated in the 2022 Olympics, but didn’t win any individual medals; burned out from the athletic grind, she quit at age 16. “Literally, my whole life was just skating and scores. If I fell, life was over. If I took one day off, it was over,” she said. “I was always in fight-or-flight mode when I was a kid.” She spent the next few years hiking Everest base camp; attending UCLA, where she majored in psychology while taking a few film classes; and, crucially, finding her calling outside of competing. At the end of that year, she self-pierced her frenulum.

When she returned to competition, in 2024, she did so entirely on her own terms. “I was like, ‘You tell me to change, I’m quitting again,’ ” she said of the officials who bristled at her feral-kawaii look, a sharp break from the steely status quo set by traditional ice princesses. “Why would I change my hair for you?” That self-assurance has since produced the so-called Alysa Liu Effect, a continuous scroll of videos in which people revisit sports after having quit them.

When a contact in the tournament world suggested Liu listen to Donna Summer’s “MacArthur Park Suite,” something clicked immediately. “I was like: I can dance to this,” she said. An iconic photograph shot during Liu’s Olympic free skate captures her rapturous Biellmann finish, the move in which she reaches back, grabs the blade of her skate, and pulls it overhead until her body forms an almost impossibly elongated teardrop shape while spinning. The image is nearly abstract, the gold costume whirling outward as if worn by an after-dark reveler lost in the music at Studio 54. Never mind that she didn’t know who Donna Summer was. After her performance, the 1978 song hit No. 1 on Billboard’s Dance Digital Song Sales chart. Now Liu’s favorite track is “I Feel Love.”

Liu collaborated on the dresses she wore at the Olympics with the designer Lisa McKinnon. The gold competition look—built around an asymmetrical shoulder cut, drenched in crystals, with a turtleneck-choker silhouette—was conceived to read “very disco, very sparkly, lots of movement,” Liu said. The number registered across the cultural spectrum. Barbra Streisand, who recorded with Summer the 1979 duet “No More Tears (Enough Is Enough),” posted it on her Instagram; Sports Illustrated’s Swimsuit issue featured a gold bathing suit by the Blonds that paid homage to Liu’s free-skating fashion.

For her exhibition program, set to PinkPantheress and Zara Larsson’s “Stateside” (which also skyrocketed to the top of the charts), Liu wore a puff of pinstripes that drew on J-pop theatrics. She improvised the choker from a scrap of fabric. “I love pinstripes, but in crystal, because I’m a figure skater,” Liu said. The buns in her hair were color-coded to match the Olympic rings.

She traces her performance instincts back to her childhood spent studying the masters of compressed, high-impact visual spectacle. “Ever since I was, like, 3 years old, I’ve loved watching music videos by Lady Gaga, Michael Jackson, and Britney Spears,” she said. She almost went to school for film, which explains in part why her costumes and choreography have such cinematic flair. On YouTube, her layback spins and open-arm landings rack up views commensurate with those of the tracks they’re performed to. In March, Liu worked with the Oscar-nominated costume designer and stylist Miyako Bellizzi, a fellow Bay Area native, on looks for her post-Olympics New York City press tour.

“I think everything has a little bit of art in it,” she said, gently thrusting her piercing with her tongue as she considered her next leap forward. Still, she added, “someone could teach me how to sew so I can make everything on my own.”

Hair by Tamara McNaughton for Bumble and Bumble at R3-MGMT; makeup by Yumi Lee for Armani Beauty at Streeters. Photo Assistants: Nick Thomsen, John Griffith; Retouching: Vingt-Six; Fashion Assistant: Isabel Choi; Special Thanks to The Rink at Rockefeller Center.

Several decades before Jennifer Venditti became one of the most in-demand casting directors in Hollywood—a woman known for her uncanny ability to pick a potential scene-stealer out of the crowd at, say, a nerd-packed anime convention or an acne-blighted high school cafeteria—she orchestrated her own casting, at a Midwestern shopping mall. It was the dawn of the ’90s, and Venditti, who grew up in St. Paul, Minnesota, was a student at Chicago’s International Academy of Merchandising and Design when she heard that one of her idols, the designer Anna Sui, would be making a local in-store appearance. With her boyfriend in tow and her résumé in hand, Venditti dressed herself (and her man, who happened to be a model) in the most eye-catching vintage she could get her hands on—“I was really obsessed with the whole grunge thing,” she says—and headed to the event, where she waited for her moment. Sure enough, Sui approached. “She liked what we were wearing,” Venditti remembers. Over the course of a quick conversation, Venditti expressed her desire to land a summer internship in the New York fashion world. Sui instructed her to fax her résumé to Keeble Cavaco & Duka, one of the top fashion PR and production firms (now known as KCD), and within weeks Venditti was working under the agency’s runway producer, Nian Fish, on a Calvin Klein show. She dressed models backstage and spent hours with the brand’s head of show production, the soon-to-be Carolyn Bessette Kennedy. She never made it back to school in Chicago.

After two years at KCD, where she did “a little bit of everything” but ultimately concentrated on casting, Venditti left to assist the stylist Lori Goldstein. It was, in many ways, a dream job. “I was traveling around the world with all the top photographers, doing stuff with Madonna and Annie Leibovitz,” she says. But she eventually got frustrated by what she saw as the industry’s closed-minded lack of creativity when it came to models. “It was rules and dogma and trends: Someone’s saying this is what it is, and then everyone else is doing their version of that. First it was Brazilian beauty, then Belgian beauty.…” One day, she was working on a magazine cover shoot, and “I just looked around and thought, I can’t do this anymore.” She decided to start her own agency, hoping to encourage a more expansive definition of beauty through street casting.

Her timing was spot-on. With the supermodel era winding down and reality TV on the rise, stylists and photographers were realizing that so-called regular people (who were more often not actually “regular” but in some way unusual looking) could be an especially compelling addition to fashion shoots. One of the first to embrace the idea was W’s creative director at the time, Dennis Freedman, who hired Venditti to cast some of the magazine’s most elaborate fashion stories. Whereas today “we have the street through Instagram,” says Venditti, in those pre–social media days, street casting involved marathons of pavement-pounding. She combed Brazilian favelas in search of interesting faces for a story by Philip-Lorca diCorcia and scoured Penn State for a David Sims portfolio set at the school. Her most memorable trip, she says, was to Appalachia, where she befriended a young mother of five named Melissa and cast her in the 1998 Peter Lindbergh story “Coal Country.” “The magazine sent me all over the world with a Polaroid, and I just got to explore,” Venditti remembers. “Dennis never even gave me guidelines. It was just, ‘Find what you think is beautiful, what you think is interesting.’ ”

A casting trip to Maine in 2006 led to her film career. There, she struck up a conversation at a high school lunch table with a 15-year-old social outlier named Billy Price, whom his classmates described as “a total weirdo.” Venditti was entranced by his unfiltered honesty and off-kilter outlook and decided to make a documentary about him. “I wanted to experience the world through his eyes,” she says. Billy the Kid was released in 2007, and, Venditti says, “I started getting calls from, like, Spike Jonze and Ryan Gosling. Everyone was kind of just like, ‘I love the way you see the world. Will you populate my world like that?’ ”

Venditti’s most serendipitous connection came via a screening of the doc at the South by Southwest festival, in Austin, Texas, where she noticed two brothers playing pool. “I thought they were so cute, and I think I tried to scout them,” she says, laughing. It turns out they were the then-unknown auteurs Josh and Benny Safdie, with whom she’s now worked on multiple films, including the duo’s Uncut Gems in 2019 and Josh’s Marty Supreme in 2025, for which Venditti was nominated for the inaugural Oscar in the category of casting.

Finding actors for a film or television show, says Venditti—who’s also known for her work on the HBO series Euphoria—is very different from casting a fashion shoot. For still photography, “you just look for a face, photograph the face, and then you get their contact info.” With a movie, “you have to get a performance out of them.” The first step, she says, is building trust with a person, which she does over the course of several in-depth, interview-esque conversations. When she’s dealing with nonactors, the idea isn’t to determine whether they can act, but “to see if there’s anything from their own life that they can bring to the role,” she says. “My whole thing is, I’m trying to create the cinema of life.” Most of all, she says, she’s looking for a compelling, magnetic singularity that might be described as “star quality,” but that she calls simply “authenticity.” The ability to spot it has been the key to her success. “The strongest tool that I have is instinct,” she says. “I can just kind of feel, This person has ‘it.’ I can literally feel it in my body.”

Hair by Junya Nakashima for Oribe at Streeters; makeup by Romy Soleimani at eArtists; fashion assistant: Sofia Prochilo; makeup assistant: Jackie Piccola.