Good Hair
This newsletter is a little longer than usual. I thought I should give a little background on a project I’ve been working on, but don’t worry! Next week we will return to our regular programming (ie. making lists of stuff I think you’ll like).
Studio Sanne Visser works with hair, and not in the way you might think.
They collect waste-hair from local salons and use it to make ropes, compost mats, bricks, and other useful things, and are big proponents of waste-hair as an overlooked (and very handy) material.
Basically, Visser wants hair taken seriously. So a few months ago she invited a crew of designers, all working in different mediums, to use hair in our work.
At first, I wasn’t sure how to approach it. Would I dye it? Or quilt it? Or something else? Being something of a history nerd, I started looking at how hair has been used in the past and trying to understand how our perceptions of it as a material have changed over time.
My research led me to a book, the capaciously titled “Self-instruction in the Art of Hair Work: dressing hair, making curls, switches, braids, and Hair Jewellery of every description (compiled from Original designs and the Latest Parisian Patterns)”.
It’s a Victorian (of course it is) book that does what it says it does. Filled with practical advice, illustrations, and some amusing advertisements for wigs, gold jewellery fixings, and baldness ‘cures’ that also soothe sunburns, the book glimpses into social attitudes behind hair at the time.
Namely, how do you remember a loved one when photography barely exists and painted portraits are very expensive? You get a bit of their hair and make it into a bracelet. That’s how.
I got kind of stuck on this idea of hair as a sentimental memory keeper, and decided that that would be the core of my project. I’ve used some of the motifs in the book, and embroidered hair rope (made with some of my own hair) onto a cream wool leisure suit (yes, working with it did creep me out at first).
The work, which I’ve titled “A Suit to Remember Me By” is on show this week at the Material Matters fair at London Design Festival.
More Good Hair
J.D ‘Okhai Ojeikere’s Photographs of Elaborate Nigerian Hair styles.
The Dogwood Dyer’s indigo hair dye.
And of course, no conversation about hair would be complete without a mullet.
In this case, the 2024 Mullet Championship winners.
The Photo: Ocean ripples at Whangapoua, New Zealand. I didn’t have any pictures of hair that I thought were appropriate.