chanel hair accessories; @chanel
There was a time when buying fancy hair accessories was a sign that I was on day 26 of my cycle and shouldn’t be let loose with any more than small change. Now I wonder where I put all the bands, clamps, clips and slides. At Chanel, Prada, Dolce & Gabbana and more, models wore diamante snowflakes, slides and starbursts studded into the base of ponytails, around messy buns and pinning back waves. I am irresistibly drawn to the less flashy costume pearl hairwear at Simone Rocha and Shrimps (alice bands notwithstanding – am I alone in finding them painful?). Pearls are extremely flattering near skin, and I like their contradictory demure/camp associations. The act of putting them on hair accessories instead of a three-strand necklace makes them more fun, so I recommend you snap up those I recently got in Zara (from just £4.95 for two, though I bought five – I am as God made me).
For more casual days, I’m enjoying a humble kirby grip placed prominently at the front, as seen at Mary Katrantzou and Blumarine. The trick here is not to attempt to match your hair colour. A deliberately contrasting shade (brass on dark hair, chocolate brown on blondes and so on) looks cooler. It’s also the only chic way of growing out a fringe. As much as I’m enjoying the headgear craze, I draw the line at the Fergie-style bows at Emilia Wickstead and Rodarte.
Plaits – not your loose, sexy, Bardot variety, nor your horrifically complex 1980s fishbone type, but what I would call simple “school plaits” – were a surprise feature at Hermès, Max Mara and Thom Browne. The look here is meant to be quite tough and practical, which I love, but to stop plaits looking too severe, I like to first rough up hair with dry shampoo (I’m currently using Colab Dreamer, £2.33 for 200ml, because it isn’t chalky and doesn’t smell of car air freshener, like so many others). It adds guts and texture and stops Caucasian hair plaits from looking too spindly and St Trinian’s.
Finally, you can give yourself a break about never having nailed those tonged, beachy waves, and fire up your GHDs (from £109) with impunity. Tom Ford, David Koma and Markus Lupfer all went for glossy, super-straight manes in their shows, but this wasn’t the aggressively, flat Atomic Kitten look of yore, but a cooler, more casual vibe. It’s best achieved by drying with a paddle brush, then straightening in large, irregular sections, rather than painstakingly ironing the whole thing. Which is great news if you want to spend more of these darker mornings in bed.
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