In today’s economic marketplace, all the signs for a slowing economy are evident and our clients start thinking about cutting back on unnecessary goods and services. At first, to stretch their dwindling discretionary dollars, they stay away a little longer to extend the life of a cut or color. Eventually, we are all staring out our windows into empty parking lots.
We have all suffered slow periods before and some have developed strategies to combat them. A good salon cleaning, moves to increase the availability of services and a push to tighten up stylists’ appearance and skills all work towards a more successful and profitable salon. Yet, we sense our best stylists are looking around for another opportunity. We clean out the junk and toss out the less than profitable retail lines. Yet the bills keep rolling in like ocean breakers. How do we keep the stylists in, the creditor letters out and attract some old and new clients?
Short chopped bobs are back on the runways and in the major fashion magazines, such as Elle and Vogue. Leading hair and salon trend publications, such as Launchpad, American Salon and Modern Salon have recenbtly presented the Bob in articles and photographic displays. The new bobs are blunter in the nape and still textured and disconnected around the face. Bangs are back, too, and help the new bobs establish portrait framing around the eyes. Bangs tend to be angled to touch one brow and range from serrated to coarse bluntness.
The short bob is an exciting modernist movement in hair and, although promoted by Hollywood, is the first sign ythat the design industry is taking back the territory lost to Hollwood and the media some fifteen years ago. Perhaps hair and clothing designers will, again, create fashion head to toe and not wait for English pop bands and New York street waifs to determine new fashion. Its anyone’s call.
Bellevue Fashion Week
Fashion Week ‘08, Sep 12 - 20, 2008
Bellevue Fashion Week ’08 is a powerful package of nine days of fashion shows, beauty and hair events and special group events to excite the Eastside and Seattle area to the new trends in the fashion pantheon. This third year offering of excitement will take place at The Bellevue Collection that includes Bellevue Square, Bellevue Place and Lincoln Square. Many of the events will be at the Fashion AXIS at Lincoln Square
Friday, Sep 12 7pm Nordstrom Fall Runway Fashion Show at Fashion AXIS (Lincoln Square)
Enjoy a cocktail and hors d’ouevres reception followed by a full runway fashion show (at 8pm) featuring the newest fashion and the latest trends. All proceeds will benefit the Detlef Schrempf Foundation.
Saturday, Sep 13 6pm Posh Party - Girls’ Night Out Fashion AXIS (Lincoln Square)
Just for “girlfriends”, the evening is filled with appetizers, cocktails, entertainment, swag bags plus a runway show featuring retailers throughout The Collection. Hair by Obadiah Salon in Bellevue Place.
Sunday, Sep 14 7pm An Evening with 7 Fashion AXIS (Lincoln Square)Salon 7 presents their Fall and Winter collection.
Thursday, Sep 18 7pm David Lawrence Fall Fashion Spectacular Fashion AXIS (Lincoln Square) A fall runway show featuring the hottest & freshest men’s & women’s fashions from Versace, D&G, Rock & Republic, John Richmond, Roberto Cavalli, and others.
Friday, Sep 19 7pm RAG Mens Style & Voletta Couture - The Unexpected Fashion AXIS (Lincoln Square)
You’ll see a runway show that will turn everything you thought you knew about fashion upside down.
Saturday, Sep 20 6pm The Collective Trend Show Will show the trendiest looks from The Bellevue Collection
Sep
4
Bumbershoot 2008: A Sense of Place
Filed Under Trends & News, Hairstyles: The Good the Bad & The Ugly
Bumbershoot OMG. Neko Case, Band of Horses, Beck, Estelle, Nada Surf, The Walkmen. OMG. Man Man, M Ward, Anti-Flag, Black Keys, Stone Temple Pilots, Jakob Dylan, The Whigs, These Arms Are Snakes, The Blakes, Paramore, OMG. Offspring, Superchunk, Death Cab For Cutie, The Physics, Bedouin Sounclash, Del Tha Funky Homosapiens, Old 97’s, Head Like A Kite, Minus the Bear, Flobots, The Maldives, Velella Velella, OMG.
All good reasons why this generation gets the best music since the punk-prog rock revolution and way back to the Kinks and Van Morrison. It will never be any better. Oh, yes, and the display of great hair, makeup, clothes et al, was way over the top. Full beards, wild hair and costumes are baaaaccckkkk! Did Seattle have fun or what?
Aug
25
Tracy Reese Summer to Fall 2008
Filed Under Trends & News, Hairstyles: The Good the Bad & The Ugly
Tracy Reese has been on a tear lately. Her designs are the must-haves for Hollywood chic and the Brentwood set. For spring 2008, she promoted North African prints ensconced in clearly French design work and showed pinks pale orange, fucia and sandstone hues to replicate a North African desert filed with glistening gilded sand.
Designed by Edris, models had their hair french-braided to the side, front and back, then joined together with a post-emo side sweep. Fall 2008 was a bit more metallic with darker colors and hair that looked slightly wasted from a night of too many clubs. Fall also brought mellow blueberry oversized prints that were clearly vintage bohemian meets Fifth Avenue.
Aug
13
New-Speak Fashion and Music in Seattle
Filed Under Trends & News, Hairstyles: The Good the Bad & The Ugly
Bands in the Seattle area - our home base - are beginning to look like a Magic Bullet performed a 5-second blending of the 1970s (flares, muddled prints, skin-tight tops and corduroy) and the 1980s (Material Girrrl with heavy metal bobbles mates with preppie Wall Street Machiniks).
We see a rebalancing of both these aesthetics when we look at the Brit bands and the Midwest-to-west coast indie bands. Last week, this author went with his daughter Kaitlyn and her friends to a post-Warp Tour concert at Studio Seven, where four bands were dressed as if the 1970s post hippie look had briskly banged up against the deconstructed 1980s preppie look.
T
he unrestrained music by Paris Livore (an aggregate of For Open Arms alumni), Miles from Home and Goodnight Sunrise, the crowd of fellow musicians and loyalists, and Studio Seven’s intimate setting made this a memorable concert. The best part of the evening was the acoustic sing-along by Miles from Home, when the sound system briefly dumped. The show made me a believer in the renaissance of the Seattle music scene and a fan of the new-speak fashion. It was spectacular, to say the least.
OK, maybe this has nothing to do with hair, salons, celebrity hair or the mating habits of silver-back gorillas, but why are we not all watching the Flight of the Conchord music videos, like this one on YouTube, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BLJ5a6aJOb8? Hey! They gots roller-skates and hair, right? I mean, it qualifies as one subject which greatly concerns salon professionals, no? Once in a while, we digress, but, that’s alright, baby, we jus wanna give a shout-out to all the ladies of the world.
Aug
5
Long Blondes: Indie Sounds & Style
Filed Under Trends & News, Hairstyles: The Good the Bad & The Ugly
The Long Blondes channel New Order when they first burst into our headphones, the Pet Shop Boys, and retro Blondie. The eighties are referenced resorted and made immediate by a blender of electronic synth . It is 1982 and you are inNew York City sharing an apartment in Midtown.
Spin magazine says: “Kate Jackson sings like she has amazing taste in lipstick, delivering smart, sex-as-a-weapon lyrics with a swaggering smirk that conveys both glam-charged confidence and femme-specific vulnerability.” That is why Spin writers are absolutely worth reading: bloody pure poetry, that is.
The sense of style in hair and clothing Long Blondes exhibits underlines why retro references are sometimes very good on the eye
There are many different types of learners: those that only need to see or hear something to be able to reproduce it, those who need formal mentoring, those who do it and know it from the effort and those that need a structured linear presentation of the skill. Getting good reference books can speak to all differing learning modes and we have, with the help of Amazon.com, discovered a small but influential collection.
Cutting Hair the Vidal Sassoon Way, Revised Edition by Vidal Sassoon is a picture-rich updated tutorial in cutting with precision and concrete technique. It is timely because current hair trends are pointin to more formalized technique in cutting combined with dry scissor finishing work to soften strong geometry. This is a must-have reference.
Essensuals, Next Generation Toni & Guy: Step by Step by Sacha Mascolo, Christian Mascolo and Stuart Wesson. This highly informative and deeply illustrated book contains 20 of Essensuals’ cutting-edge styles from the late 1990s with clear instructions on how to reproduce them. These looks were revolutionary and are still mimicked by everyone from the Sassoon team to bumble and Bumble.
There are many different types of learners: those that only need to see or hear something to be able to reproduce it, those who need formal mentoring, those who do it and know it from the effort and those that need a structured linear presentation of the skill. Getting good reference books can speak to all differing learning modes and we have, with the help of Amazon.com, discovered a small but influential collection.
Cutting Hair the Vidal Sassoon Way, Revised Edition by Vidal Sassoon is a picture-rich updated tutorial in cutting with precision and concrete technique. It is timely because current hair trends are pointin to more formalized technique in cutting combined with dry scissor finishing work to soften strong geometry. This is a must-have reference.
Essensuals, Next Generation Toni & Guy: Step by Step by Sacha Mascolo, Christian Mascolo and Stuart Wesson. This highly informative and deeply illustrated book contains 20 of Essensuals’ cutting-edge styles from the late 1990s with clear instructions on how to reproduce them. These looks were revolutionary and are still mimicked by everyone from the Sassoon team to bumble and Bumble.
The Inside Haircutting System by Tony Trono is a straight-forward working stylists how-to book. It is a step-by-step walk through money-making cuts that are essential for the stylist who wishes a foundation to tweak and evolve.
Men’s Hairdressing: Traditional and Modern Barbering by Maurice Lister is a perusal of the official Habia and City & Guilds guide to the S/NVQ Level 2 and 3 barbering standards, which is a mouthful. It is also a book full of illustrated examples and advice from the best barbers and men’s stylist in the country.
There are more books on the topic worth having, but this should get you started.The Inside Haircutting System by Tony Trono is a straight-forward working stylists how-to book. It is a step-by-step walk through money-making cuts that are essential for the stylist who wishes a foundation to tweak and evolve.
Men’s Hairdressing: Traditional and Modern Barbering by Maurice Lister is a perusal of the official Habia and City & Guilds guide to the S/NVQ Level 2 and 3 barbering standards, which is a mouthful. It is also a book full of illustrated examples and advice from the best barbers and men’s stylist in the country.
There are more books on the topic worth having, but this should get you started.
Never say “never”, because big hair is back with a vengeance! Instead of fearing big hair let us embrace that whic knows no shame and gather at the river of backcombed curls to lift and heal the hair with lacquer. Let the bangs rise up and cascade and go surf to big hair heaven on a wave of spray mousse and spritzes! I have to sit down for a moment. I feel so dirty yet so shamelessly satisfied.
Long gone are the days of soft natural shapes that caress the shoulders. We are heading for territory pioneered by Farah and to a place where only one or two women at a time can occupy the cloister of an elevator. Big hair is back in wide screen Technicolor and is coming soon to a salon near you.