Among cognoscenti, Guido Palau is one of the few in fashion to have achieved mononym status. Mention the British hairstylist’s first name to insiders and they can easily pick up a litany of his memorable style moments. Think frail glam supermodels in the George Michael “Freedom! ’90” video; grunge-era Calvin Klein campaigns featuring Kate Moss then a bum; stark theatrical collaborations with Alexander McQueen; and campy Versace shoots staged by Richard avedon.
In ordinary times, Mr. Palau and his team spend months each year creating influential ad campaigns and styling hair for top designer catwalks. The pandemic, of course, curtailed those activities, but did little to impede Mr. Palau to limit. He still assisted on shows and photo shoots, not least a striking British Vogue cover from January 2022 featuring 56-year-old model Kristen McMenamy with her gray mane in the center and painted in rainbow hues. For the past two years, Mr. However, Palau has focused his energies on a series of hairstyle experiments that have been posted on Instagram and have now been collected in a new book published by Idea: “#HairTests.”
Reached by phone at his weekend home in Bridgehampton, NY, the hairstylist, who is 59, shared his unlikely career path and his belief that hair can be a transformative medium.
Guy Trebay You’ve been at the top for so long that people often forget how you got there.
Guido Palau To be honest, growing up in England in the 60s and 70s, I probably had the least chance of success.
GT Was this in Bournemouth?
general practitioner Yes, Bournemouth was a seaside town where young people would get their styles from London. I couldn’t wait for the holidays to see what the Londoners would wear, although it’s not like I knew anything about the small fashion world back then.
GT It’s amazing how much of what would later become thoroughly mainstream in fashion came from those subcultures.
general practitioner The England of that period was full of street culture. There were many sub-genres. I had no deep-seated desire to do her, but I always kept an eye on what people looked like. I had traveled around Europe before moving to London, young and irresponsible. It was fun, but when I came back to my hometown at 19, I had to figure out something to make a living. I had some girlfriends do her, and I thought, “I can do that.”
GT In a fairly short time, you were both hired and fired by Vidal Sassoon.
general practitioner Working for Sassoon was very important. The salon was on South Molton Street, a closed pedestrian street that resembled a catwalk. I was far too shy to be a peacock myself, but I was in awe of people who would act that way and obsessed with how people looked. That was formative, although I didn’t realize it at the time.
GT It makes sense that you would become known for your array of cultural reference points.
general practitioner Going out to clubs was my education. London was this melting pot of creative people who wanted to be designers or pop stars. I was going to go to the clubs with my new boyfriend, David Sims, a young photographer assistant, and the two of us started to kind of gang up and build our own visual reference library.
GT In a funny way, fashion is reminiscent of Robert Frost’s poem – “home is the place where they should take you if you have to go there.”
general practitioner Fashion is this fun, dysfunctional playground for misfits. That is what binds us. I was very lucky in my career because I was quickly picked up by magazines; it’s not that it was my skills.
GT That seems too modest to me.
general practitioner When I was a grumpy teenager confused about things, my father said, “You’re really lazy and you’re never going to make anything of yourself.” Even now I can happily do nothing all day.
GT Doing nothing is seriously underestimated.
general practitioner I still daydream like I did when I was a teenager. I’m making up characters or something that I could do with her. Daydreaming is part of the job. I daydreamed about this book.
GT Can you talk about that and how you got started with “#HairTests?”
general practitioner I’ve always met designers for shows to try things out on models and come up with ideas. I shot those looks on my phone to show my team. Then people would also ask me for pictures from backstage to post on their accounts, so I was already taking these pictures.
GT Those sound like pretty simple documents. “#HairTests” feels closer to something Cindy Sherman may have done.
general practitioner This was not a great photographic exercise. When things started to slow down, I still needed content. People react very well to new images. The thing with Instagram is you have to feed it.
GT Maybe I’m responding to the format here. You only shot in profile, very simple, but there is a formal, if improvisational, way you create ephemeral sculpture and unexpected transformations using the hair medium. One model resembles a Klingon, the other a character from a De Sica movie.
general practitioner “#HairTests” is actually a sketchbook. At first I thought, “I’ll ask models if I can do their hair, and I’ll just take a picture on my phone.” I was planning to do a little fanzine. I even went to a Staples and I stapled these things all together and thought, “Oh, that’s not so bad.”
GT Then Idea came along, and now you have a $90 tome that looks like it should be sold at Art Basel.
general practitioner I really don’t want it to sound like I’m pushing myself. This has all been very low key. We got a group of kids and sat down with them to model their hair. I would look at them to see what fantasy they radiated.
GT Still, the book has a really cool design, this fluorescent ring binder wrapped in cardboard, and feels like an actual art book, rather than another designer vanity publication.
general practitioner What I wanted to do with this was make a book about how hair can change someone – how you can use it to create a character. Whenever you create a hairstyle, it is like creating architecture: the shape is the structure of the house and the texture is the walls. Then you compensate things. Even when I do the most basic hairstyle, I always want something to be a little questionable. It can be too blunt, or too short, or something isn’t right – so you have to ask yourself why it’s interesting.
GT The sculptural shapes you’ve come up with on Black models seem particularly remarkable. It’s not just that they became elements of a fantastic British Vogue cover and shoot – the one for last April’s release – but that they amount to powerful cultural statements. The hairstyles are so extravagantly architectural that the models end up looking as stately as Benin bronzes or deities from an 18th dynasty frieze.
general practitioner It is funny. That young lady I photographed with a large semi-dome had beautifully textured hair. I just took what was there and tied it up in a knot. We used some hairpieces and puffed it all up and over a pad. The whole thing looks a lot more complicated than it was; it probably took 20 minutes to make. Then of course, as with all hairstyles, the whole conception is only one minute away from the pulling apart.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.