FASHION

BACKSTAGE BEAUTY: SOFT FOCUS HAIR

Windswept, weathered, tousled or teased, the hair that breezed down the New York Fall 2013 runways was anything but Marcia Brady smooth.


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Windswept, weathered, tousled or teased, the hair that breezed down the New York Fall 2013 runways was anything but Marcia Brady smooth. Keeping locks just shy of disheveled seemed the deliberate motive of many hairstylists, who perfected that delicate balance of slightly skewed and beautifully ethereal.

At Tory Burch, hairstylist Eugene Souleiman wove pigtails of intricate fishtail braids then loosened them to the brink of falling apart by rubbing them from their centers outward with his thumbs.

The models at 3.1 Phillip Lim were meant to look like girls attending a music festival, so Paul Hanlon created large finger-wave-like curves into the locks, along with the occasional backcombed tangle worthy of a front row fanatic.

Hanlon worked the hair at Vera Wang into nearly dreadlocked pieces, which he wrapped in tight tornado sections above the heads, creating what he described as “turbans.” “It’s rustic and savage, like she’s lived outside,” Hanlon explained at Wang, where the dry, fabric-like finish was attained with Fekkai Full Blown Volume Mousse. “We’re taking out that TV morning show shine,” he added. “It should look like she’s slept in it for two weeks.”

Even the classic French chignon experienced a bit of rolled-down window effect. At The Row, Odile Gilbert freed a few strands from her twisted chignons, and at Donna Karan, Souleiman let the flyaways flutter around his loosely knotted updos.

The prettiest part of all these various fuzzy effects was the way the errant hairs caught the light. Perhaps Souleiman put it best at Tory Burch: “It’s like you see this halo around the hair.”