The world according to Guido Palau, the man behind fashion’s hottest hairstyles

The stylist and author of a book of images capturing a nation in lockdown explains how the way we wear our locks reflects the changing zeitgeist

He might not be a household name, but you’ll certainly be familiar with the hairstyles he’s created over the decades for the catwalk, magazine covers and ad campaigns. Guido Palau, the man behind some of the most influential hair in fashion, was showing off his form again in London last week – on the front of British Vogue, with the unconventional 54-year-old supermodel Kristen McMenamy, and at a Jack Kerouac-inspired Dior men’s show.

The 59-year-old Dorset-born, Anglo-Iberian Palau also published #Hairtests, a spiral-bound book that captures the presentation of hair, or relative relaxation of it, over the course of the pandemic amid broad re-negotiations around gender and diversity.

“We all manage to curate something we’re interested in, flowers or animals or whatever, on Instagram,” Palau – known in the fashion world simply as “Guido” – told the Observer on his way to a test for the show at Kensington’s Olympia last week. “I just happen to be into hair.”

Palau, who is known to execute dozens of shows and can have 100 producers and hairstylists under his direction at each, is a protege of Vidal Sassoon and was a close collaborator of the late Alexander McQueen. He is also one of the key figures to bring the grungy, anti-perfection and individualistic movement of British fashion in the early 90s to the wider world.

It may be that, as philosophy and politics falter, it will again be up to hairdressers to provide clues to what women often know and men less easily grasp: that among exterior clues to the interior life, hair can be the most instructive.

“I’m being informed the whole time. Most people have hair on their head – though a lot of people don’t – so the way hair is worn, intentionally or not, interests me. Combed, brushed or dyed, put up or down in their own way, it’s all something I pick up on.”

The images in the book document hairstyles in profile and without makeup, taken on an iPhone, and later posted online. They are an impression, in a sense, of what was – and still is – happening, in a vulnerable time.

“Young people are looking at the 90s again and [are] inspired by that time. We see it in the individualism of the models, but [also] in a more diverse, inclusive way. When there’s a reaction in fashion that sticks, it’s always something to do with the world changing because fashion and beauty reflect the times.”

For one, the changes beauty currently reflects are less gendered. “Masculine and feminine seem kind of old now, so I try to look at their profile, see what fits. It’s more fluid. I’ve always been interested in an ambiguous kind of sexuality, and always wanted hair to be slightly questionable.”

Fashion, of course, has taken its share of recent criticism for lapses in approach and sensitivity to issues of social justice. “There’s a new awareness to how people feel or have felt in the past, and rightfully so,” he says.

Palau’s craft, then, is to take from the street, interpret, place in a fashion show or magazine and filter back. It is, by definition, a highly mutable process. “I can’t really tell. People might see it in a different way, and then take it back, consciously or unconsciously, or it’s just in the zeitgeist. People are more aware now, because there’s so much more information out there than when I started, when we didn’t know where references came from.”

Instagram is affecting the changes, in part because visual information is being posted and absorbed, as Palau says, all day long. “Beauty trends are coming into our home, or into our hand, all the time.”

There was a moment early in the pandemic when the beauty business, for reasons of social distance, effectively ceased to function, returning people to do-it-yourself, make-do-and-mend. To Palau, Covid has given people time to reflect on self-presentation, and that, in turn, has propelled a return to individualism.

“If a woman wants to go out with damp hair because she’s just washed it, nonchalantly cool, it should be completely acceptable. Wet hair always looks sexy, and hair in fashion is what people wear anyway. So it’s about realness or reality. No one should feel they have to look a certain way for anyone bar themselves, and the idea of social acceptability is hopefully breaking down. The way your hair looks should be your idea of it.”

That, in a sense, is a throwback to the 90s. But even the most maligned decades, like the 80s, came with cool looks as sub-cults, from goths to New Wave to New Romantics, proliferated alongside the glamour dos of Dallas or the yuppies. “Fashion takes from the past but it never really goes back. If you do, it’s a pastiche.”

Palau is not of any particular church, though friends joke that he’s never seen a pudding bowl he doesn’t love. “Hair is important to everyone. Women love to talk about it, men love to talk about it. Sometimes it gets a bit of a short straw and people don’t realise how difficult it is to do well. It is psychologically impactful as it changes the way people feel and look. When you look back, it’s amazing how it’s changed and how it defines social aspects of life.”

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from The Guardian