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Like the angels of good and bad riding on a man’s shoulders, reality and fantasy were the ever-competing forces in the life and work of the hairdresser Ara Gallant. Born Ira Gallantz in the Bronx, he gave himself a new name and forged a very distinctive style as he rose in the world: When Vogue profiled him in 1973, it omitted mention of his kohl-rimmed eyes and sideburns—but painted a vivid portrait of a man who was “small, painstaking, invariably in black,” and “naked without his Japanese schoolboy cap studded with talismans from pals and admirers.”
This creative polymath, who initially found fame as a colorist, became “the first hairdresser to be paid by a magazine—Vogue—for his services” in 1965 when he joined the core beauty team assembled under its editor, Diana Vreeland. Many of the Swinging Sixties looks the Vogue beauty corps whipped up have become genuine emblems of the Youthquake, a culture-wide focus on youth, personal expression, and fantasy.
Gallant worked extensively with the photographer Richard Avedon, forging a collaboration so intense that the pair became known as “Aradon.” Fluid, joyful movement was important to these two American talents. Gallant became particularly celebrated for his “throwing” or “flying” hair technique, making models’ and starlets’ bountiful tresses move with undulating grace as they romped and leaped for Avedon’s lens. But Gallant was no one-trick pony: “He did his research everywhere,” said Polly Mellen, a fashion editor and sometime colleague; among his areas of interest were French history and all things Gothic. (The model Janice Dickinson later recalled Gallant’s New York living quarters: “The apartment’s walls were as black as Andy Warhol’s Factory walls were silver, and all the furniture was fluorescent. You didn’t even have to be high to feel high.”)
Gallant was minutely aware of the most subtle aesthetic and cultural shifts; he was the enemy of nostalgia. “My kind of designing is so very personal,” he told The Village Voice in 1970. “It hinges mostly on my feelings and my model. If I’m turned on to her it works. If not, well . . . it doesn’t.” Among those with whom he clicked on-set were Twiggy, Anjelica Huston, Veruschka, and Penelope Tree. A restless talent, Gallant began in the early 1970s to wean himself from Vogue, and from hair, in order to pursue photography and other projects, including costume-making. He struggled with a slew of personal problems, including financial difficulties and drug addiction in the 1980s. Still, after he committed suicide in Las Vegas in 1990, Mellen called him “the greatest hairdresser in my lifetime.”
vogue.com/voguepedia
