Heavy Metal: Copper-Streaked Hair at Haider Ackermann
by Catherine Piercy
What does a walk through Haider Ackermann’s world look like for fall? Well, for one, there are the clothes—supremely elegant sculptural jackets, front slit skirts, and high-waisted pants in earthen tones of moss green, saffron, and rust. And then there’s the hair. As soft and moody as the strains of Frank Sinatra’s “Autumn Leaves” on the runway, the models’ wispy, copper-streaked buns possessed a surreally romantic quality—as if a crisp wind had whipped through them, leaving only a few glimmering, melancholic traces of its memory behind.
“Haider said, ‘I want black hair,’ and it just evolved from there,” said hairstylist Eugene Souleiman of the look from the opulent dressing area of the Hôtel de Ville. With a lineup of models that included blondes Anja Rubik and Daria Strokous, he had to conjure a little trompe l’oeil magic first. After blowing out the hair using Wella Professionals Ocean Spritz for texture, he saturated it with can upon can of inky Stargazer One Wash Color Hairspray to create a dark, graffiti-streaked effect—blackening his own hands up to the wrist in the process. “Don’t worry,” he said. “We’ve told their agents it will wash right out with one shampoo.” Once he’d twisted it into a messy, flyaway knot, he dipped a brush into a molten metallic makeup pigment and began applying it onto the crown with long, fine strokes at random. “It’s painterly, but not in a Renaissance way,” he said, before breaking into a devilish laugh. “If Jackson Pollock had been a hairdresser, he might have done this.”
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