Fall 2011 Hair Trend: Technicolor Streaks
Photos: Imaxtree
The bright stuff: Colored hair on the Mandy Coon, Richard Chai, and Prabal Gurung Fall 2011 runways.
Lately, when it comes to color, hairstylists have been giving makeup artists a run for their money. The New York runways were packed with jolts of show-stealing paint and pigment—and we’re not even done with Europe yet.
At Jason Wu, we’re literally talking about splashes of color. There, hairstylist Odile Gilbert used a paintbrush to apply gold-leaf paint just above the models’ regal little twists. (The entire collection was inspired by Versailles, so it was particularly fitting that Gilbert—who designed the hair for Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette—was the woman behind the brush here.)
Gold paint also made an appearance at Betsey Johnson, where it was sprayed onto the models’ blunt, flapper-style wigs in a gradated fashion. Soon after, hairstylist Peter Gray held a piece of lace against the hair and sprayed black paint on top, creating an imprint.
At Prabal Gurung, hairstylist Didier Malige wove pink, purple and blue hair extensions into the girls’ hair, but the effect was actually rather subtle. Here’s why: Malige affixed the extensions under the bulk of the hair, so they accented rather than overwhelmed. And because the bright colors were semi-washed out—Kurt Cobain in “Come as You Are” comes to mind—the look was more punk than pop star.
Mandy Coon’s stark collection was almost entirely in black and white, if not for the models’ early-’90s, skater-boy bangs, which cascaded over their right eyes in purples, blues, oranges, pinks and more. Sometimes it looked pretty, other times it looked angry. Maybe that was the point.
And while the pink hair was completely her own dye job, model Charlotte Free made a case for unnatural color at Richard Chai Love: The combination of her floaty gray-on-neutral ensemble and shocking hair hue took look number 26 to a new stratosphere of cool.
