Bare-faced and beguiling, current fashion world darling Xiao Wen Ju lets her guard down for renowned Dutch photographer Dana Lixenberg, unwinding after a gruelling Fashion Week schedule of fittings and shows in this series of intimate and raw portraits. “It’s always a bit challenging to do a natural portrait of a model,” says Lixenberg, who shot Ju in Manhattan's Lafayette House hotel. “Somehow youth and beauty dominate, so it almost helped that she was exhausted and had come from a rehearsal.” Twenty-year-old Xiao Wen, who hails from the ancient city of Xi’an in China, signed with IMG in 2010 and quickly climbed the ranks both in her home country and internationally, featuring on the cover of Harper’s Bazaar China that May as well as walking for designers including Hermès, Louis Vuitton and Prada the following year, ultimately scoring Marc Jacobs’ Spring campaign in 2012. “There’s a playful element to her,” says Lixenberg, who has shot for publications including The New Yorker, Newsweek and The New York Times Magazine and exhibited in solo shows at Amsterdam's FOAM and the Nederlands Fotomuseum. “She looks like a little dancer: petite, almost Audrey Hepburnish and very slim and flexible like a kitten. She had a quiet charisma, and it wouldn’t surprise me if it popped up in film.”