Paris Fashion Week Goes Punk: Behind the Painted Lids and Spiked Wigs at This Week’s Shows

A flock of acidic birds of paradise took wing beside the Trocadéro this morning, where Haider Ackermann punched up his Spring 2017 collection with wildly spiked strands, fanning up from heads like ruffled plumage. Backstage before the show, hairstylist Kamo Katsuya wound models’s lengths into several circular knots before pinning extensions against them, using liberal coats of strong-hold spray to keep them aloft. “It’s a little punk-inspired, but with a bit more finesse,” explained makeup artist Lynsey Alexander of the finished look, which was secured with a length of ribbon around the head and paired with a broken flick of neon pigment and MAC’s Pure White Chromaline to lend a “ballerina edge.” Mere hours later, a kaleidoscopic array of gelled and Manic Panic–ed manes tromped onto the catwalk for Junya Watanabe’s raucous punk outing alongside frenetically beautiful black and silvered lids.

A similar course was held the night before at Yohji Yamamoto, where makeup artist Pat McGrath drew pale lips and slashed white paint across the faces to enhance Eugene Souleiman’s black sculpted wigs, their edges jutting all around. “It’s an angry crow, really, isn’t it,” he said backstage. “We’re applying a rawer, animalistic kind of feeling to the hair.” As the models’s coolly eased their way down the runway to soulful strings and guitar, beneath a light fall of rain, that primal approach read magnetic—reason enough to call on a little subversion this spring.

 

 

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