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“It’s an effortless look,” Odile Gilbert tells me backstage. We’re in a nook in the New-York Historical Society in uptown New York for designer Wes Gordon’s first show for Carolina Herrera, and it is surprisingly calm considering the week’s feverish tone. The models are in rehearsals, and in the sprawling underground warren, there is a moment of quietude to chat with the venerable Gilbert before the models (and the madness) returns.
“The main thing is it’s parted down the middle, but not very well designed.” Of course, this poor design is by no means down to a lack of skill (we are talking about the legendary Odile Gilbert here), rather, translates to the irregular, a part designed so it sits a little askew rather than straight down the middle.
Slightly wayward at part, the irregularity continues down from the crown to the ends, with the rest of the hair rumpled and raw in finish, with subtle bends and gentle kinks raked with soft fingers. “They have to look like they have beautiful hair, but that they woke up like this,” Gilbert explains. A case of the Beyonces maybe, but it is what Gilbert describes as “teenage” hair. “It’s not straight, it’s not curly, it’s like teenager hair, it’s really, really simple.”
To keep it adolescent, she maintains it needs to be undone. “I love sophisticated hair and hair ‘done’, but the minute you ‘do’ your hair, it’s more sophisticated and older.” For a collection which was exuberant, joyful and full of colour, the hair referencing irreverent teenagers all makes sense, remember, “it’s always the clothes first, then the hair.”
So what is her trick to achieving Carolina’s softly spirited strands? “Not much product, and light product only. The TRESemmè Repair & Protect 7 Pre-Styling Spray to blow-dry and for a bit of curling iron to create a wave, a twist, a bend, but almost not, not too much.” It’s that simple.
“Almost nothing” hair, which amounts to a whole lot of cool, it’s exactly the kind of hair we want to have strolling through Soho, kicks on, cold brew in hand. Let cool-girl hair live on.
Shop the look
TRESemmè Repair & Protect 7 Pre-Styling Spray, $8. shop now