Schiaparelli Braid Ties & Clothes Made of Hair
I love the braid ties!
We’re back to our regular programming after a brief intermission (more like grief intermission amiright) and I want to start doing some shorter, bloggier stuff on here so this is the first one of those! I’ll be back next week talking about the Oscars :)
Yesterday Schiaparelli presented their AW24 collection and it was just as stunning as you’d expect - Daniel Roseberry once again proves he can do no wrong other than Taylor Swift’s Grammy’s look! It was a slightly more muted and commercially angled show than usual but still gorgeous, I just love this brand. In a show filled with inventive and memorable details, the one that stands out to me is the braided hair ties. The ties were featured in blonde and black and were styled with oversized suits, and I just love them. It’s like a business casual rattail. Hair is so often treated like an accessory in a cohesive look, and I love seeing that exemplified here in such a literal and detached way.
I love a little pop of surrealism, and Daniel Roseberry always delivers. He and the Schiaparelli team always impress me with the way they incorporate parts of the body into the designs, I think it’s such a cool signature motif and he’s done so many interesting things with it (Bella Hadid’s lung dress, you will ALWAYS be famous). I love the way he stayed within that realm thematically but shifted from simply incorporating images of body parts to using a body part (sort of?) as material.
This isn’t the first accessory made of hair we’ve seen recently! Last year Sandy Liang included bow hair clips that were made of braided hair in her fall show, and you can still buy the headband version. More recently, Simone Rocha’s Jean Paul Gaulter couture show featured earrings made of big hairballs and hair shaped into bows.
It’s also not just accessories - Dilara Findikoglu’s Venusian SS23 Earthly Paradise dress is embroidered with real human hair! In October Julia Fox appeared on the cover of Gay Times wearing a dress made of hair by Kimhekim, a designer who showed a whole line of hair-made dresses in the fall.
To be honest, the idea of wearing a dress made of hair, real or not, kind of makes me gag in the bad way. That is not a physical sensation I really want to experience, and I would guess that I’m not alone in that. The clothes do have a sort of innate grotesqueness about them, so ultimately I don’t think hair clothing will scale on a consumer level, but I think we’ll see more of it on runways and in editorials. I think the accessories, however, are much more approachable - the braid tie, JPG earrings, and Sandy Liang clips/headbands could translate well and easily to casualwear if you have the kooky fashion energy to pull it off. Fashion analyst Mandy Lee (aka oldloserinbrooklyn on TikTok) actually did recreate the JPG earrings and I really think they worked for her!
But overall I am very intrigued by the use of hair as a medium in fashion, because hair is so packed with meaning. Hair has a long history of being a way for us to signal our identity to others, and holds so much symbolism. Hair has so many more meanings than I could realistically get into here, but specifically for women, hair has often historically symbolized desirability, fertility, and sensuality, and I like the idea of cutting it off and using it to adorn ourselves in unexpected ways. It’s subversive in a way that works so well in tandem with the surrealism Schiaparelli has made integral to their brand. And the braid ties just look cool as hell!