Alexander McQueen’s Silver Visors

Clockwise from top right: Guido Palau with a model backstage; Looks from Alexander McQueen Fall 2012 (2)
Photo: (clockwise from top right) Kevin Tachman; Gianni Pucci/GoRunway.com (2)

In the weeks before today’s Alexander McQueen show, hairstylist Guido Palau found himself faced with a curious question: “The clothes were so dynamic; the shoes were so dynamic,” he says, reflecting on designer Sarah Burton’s lushly ornate pieces for fall. “How do you make the hair equally dynamic without falling into couture?” He’d been looking at the collection with Burton and playing around with various stylized looks, “but it was all too elegant,” he says simply. In search of a more modern McQueen woman, he returned to the hallmarks of her identity—namely, strength. “Sarah likes me to toughen the girls up a bit,” says Palau, who ultimately found his answer in the sculptural platinum-colored wigs that his team could be seen rounding into a kind of smooth, futuristic “helmet” backstage, thanks to clouds of Redken Forceful 23 hairspray. To heighten the undercurrent of “iciness,” he affixed a high-shine reflective silver visor—produced to his specs by Burton’s in-house team—on each model’s head just before she stepped onto the runway. Eclipsing her face all the way to the nose, it kept the focus where it should be— on “those visors and those clothes.”

Alexander McQueen Fall 2012
Photographed by Kevin Tachman