softgrey
flaunt the imperfection
- Joined
- Jan 28, 2004
- Messages
- 52,893
- Reaction score
- 319
Rise. Fall. Repeat.
Marc Anthony
Girl's Best Friend: Tattoos are as much Oribe's trademark as the big hair he loves. He largely credits Jennifer Lopez with his comeback. Above, Ms. Lopez's husband, Marc Anthony, captured Oribe and Ms. Lopez in a moment of contemplation.
By RUTH LA FERLA
Published: June 16, 2005
Miami Beach
AS Oribe Canales tells it, the high point of his career as a celebrity hairdresser and his fall from grace very nearly were one and the same. The year was 1993, the scene backstage before a fashion show in New York by Manolo, a Cuban-born designer with an avid cult. Grand enough himself to go by his first name only, Oribe (pronounced OR-bay) was seized by a burst of cocaine-fired inspiration. He scooped up a fistful of his special pomade, a hair cream thickly embedded with pearls, and darted toward the models.
Skip to next paragraph
Forum: Fashion and Style
Linda Evangelista's photograph by Mark Seliger, hair by Oribe in a 90's Italian Vogue.
"I just wanted to touch their faces like this," he recalled with the sweep of a palm across his cheek. "The makeup was going to be genius."
The regular makeup artist stalked away. "I was feeling crazy, but it was good crazy," Oribe said. "The models were running away from me. They were scattering in all directions." Like a mad Pygmalion, he lurched after them, smearing their faces with gobs of paste.
When the show was over, Polly Mellen, a famously effusive editor at Allure, rushed backstage demanding, "Who did the makeup?" Oribe stepped up. "The moment was fabulous," he recalled, then added flatly, "Afterward I checked into rehab."
It was one of many times during his Cyclone ride of a career that Oribe, a champion of high-volume hair with wrist-to-shoulder tattoos like a biker from "The Wild One," was compelled to reinvent himself. In his glory years, during the decadent, high-octane 1980's and early 90's, he traveled with an entourage, waving a curling wand over the likes of Naomi Campbell and Linda Evangelista, whom he helped transform into fashion's reigning divas.
"Oribe did for hairdressing what Arnold Schwarzenegger did for bodybuilding," said Brad Johns, the creative director of the Avon Salon & Spa in New York, and a former protégé. "He took it out of commonness, made it respectable, an art. In his hands it wasn't hair, it was sculpture."
In 1991 Elizabeth Arden gave Oribe his own salon on Fifth Avenue, a gilded $3 million shrine to glamour modeled after a Venetian palazzo. There he ruled, arguably the most influential stylist of his day. Then it all fell away.
Dogged by personal problems - a dodgy manager, substance abuse and a reluctance to adapt to changing styles - Oribe began a slide into quasi-obscurity. He continued to work, but the designers, photographers and high-powered editors who had doted on him dropped him. Disenchanted with New York, he walked away from the Arden salon with no explanation two years ago and decamped for Florida. His sudden early fame and his long eclipse seemed to mark him as another casualty of the volatile fashion world, in which careers can ignite and flare out in the space of a few seasons.
"Oribe's hair legacy," wrote Lindsy Van Gelder in Allure magazine in 2001, "is that he took an old (and at the time tacky) idea - big hair - and made it into an over-the-top fashion statement."
Inspired by the girls he knew growing up in Charlotte, N.C. - all dolled up like Ginger on "Gilligan's Island" - he made his name as part of a powerful triumvirate, with the makeup artist François Nars and the photographer Steven Meisel, that created influential advertising campaigns and editorial spreads for fashion magazines in the 80's and early 90's. Oribe's apotheosis came during a shoot for a Comme des Garçons ad campaign with Christy Turlington. "I did her hair really curly with leaves in it, and everyone flipped," he recalled. "It put me in a different category as a hairdresser."
His audacity earned him a reputation that soon eclipsed that of Garren, his mentor, and other reigning stylists of the day. A wizard with props, wigs and greasy pomades, Oribe earned $20,000 - then an astronomical sum - to style the hair on the runways of Chanel and Versace, painting the models' hair blue, braiding it with tennis balls and using extensions to transform chin-grazing bobs into Rapunzel-length manes. "I would always be reaching for those extensions," he mused. "I used to call out, 'Where are my puppies?' just like Cruella De Vil."
Girl's Best Friend: Tattoos are as much Oribe's trademark as the big hair he loves. He largely credits Jennifer Lopez with his comeback. Above, Ms. Lopez's husband, Marc Anthony, captured Oribe and Ms. Lopez in a moment of contemplation.
By RUTH LA FERLA
Published: June 16, 2005
Miami Beach
AS Oribe Canales tells it, the high point of his career as a celebrity hairdresser and his fall from grace very nearly were one and the same. The year was 1993, the scene backstage before a fashion show in New York by Manolo, a Cuban-born designer with an avid cult. Grand enough himself to go by his first name only, Oribe (pronounced OR-bay) was seized by a burst of cocaine-fired inspiration. He scooped up a fistful of his special pomade, a hair cream thickly embedded with pearls, and darted toward the models.
Skip to next paragraph
Linda Evangelista's photograph by Mark Seliger, hair by Oribe in a 90's Italian Vogue.
"I just wanted to touch their faces like this," he recalled with the sweep of a palm across his cheek. "The makeup was going to be genius."
The regular makeup artist stalked away. "I was feeling crazy, but it was good crazy," Oribe said. "The models were running away from me. They were scattering in all directions." Like a mad Pygmalion, he lurched after them, smearing their faces with gobs of paste.
When the show was over, Polly Mellen, a famously effusive editor at Allure, rushed backstage demanding, "Who did the makeup?" Oribe stepped up. "The moment was fabulous," he recalled, then added flatly, "Afterward I checked into rehab."
It was one of many times during his Cyclone ride of a career that Oribe, a champion of high-volume hair with wrist-to-shoulder tattoos like a biker from "The Wild One," was compelled to reinvent himself. In his glory years, during the decadent, high-octane 1980's and early 90's, he traveled with an entourage, waving a curling wand over the likes of Naomi Campbell and Linda Evangelista, whom he helped transform into fashion's reigning divas.
"Oribe did for hairdressing what Arnold Schwarzenegger did for bodybuilding," said Brad Johns, the creative director of the Avon Salon & Spa in New York, and a former protégé. "He took it out of commonness, made it respectable, an art. In his hands it wasn't hair, it was sculpture."
In 1991 Elizabeth Arden gave Oribe his own salon on Fifth Avenue, a gilded $3 million shrine to glamour modeled after a Venetian palazzo. There he ruled, arguably the most influential stylist of his day. Then it all fell away.
Dogged by personal problems - a dodgy manager, substance abuse and a reluctance to adapt to changing styles - Oribe began a slide into quasi-obscurity. He continued to work, but the designers, photographers and high-powered editors who had doted on him dropped him. Disenchanted with New York, he walked away from the Arden salon with no explanation two years ago and decamped for Florida. His sudden early fame and his long eclipse seemed to mark him as another casualty of the volatile fashion world, in which careers can ignite and flare out in the space of a few seasons.
"Oribe's hair legacy," wrote Lindsy Van Gelder in Allure magazine in 2001, "is that he took an old (and at the time tacky) idea - big hair - and made it into an over-the-top fashion statement."
Inspired by the girls he knew growing up in Charlotte, N.C. - all dolled up like Ginger on "Gilligan's Island" - he made his name as part of a powerful triumvirate, with the makeup artist François Nars and the photographer Steven Meisel, that created influential advertising campaigns and editorial spreads for fashion magazines in the 80's and early 90's. Oribe's apotheosis came during a shoot for a Comme des Garçons ad campaign with Christy Turlington. "I did her hair really curly with leaves in it, and everyone flipped," he recalled. "It put me in a different category as a hairdresser."
His audacity earned him a reputation that soon eclipsed that of Garren, his mentor, and other reigning stylists of the day. A wizard with props, wigs and greasy pomades, Oribe earned $20,000 - then an astronomical sum - to style the hair on the runways of Chanel and Versace, painting the models' hair blue, braiding it with tennis balls and using extensions to transform chin-grazing bobs into Rapunzel-length manes. "I would always be reaching for those extensions," he mused. "I used to call out, 'Where are my puppies?' just like Cruella De Vil."
