High Voltage

While I’ve been playing nurse to Napoleon – not in that way, you mucky-minded lot! - my favourite russet-haired editor has been busily gadding around for show season.

Chameleonic as always, Taylor Tomasi Hill brought hipster labels Proenza Schouler, Emmanuelle Khanh, Balenciaga, Christopher Kane and Isabel Marant out to play this fashion week.  Hard-edged and offbeat, her aesthetic has evolved to the wittily idiosyncratic.

Witty?

Is there better way to describe the interplay between rebellious adolescence – sartorially manifested in spiked Louboutin high tops, a punk rock Junya Watanabe net skirt, and Burberry biker jacket – and her signature ‘I’m a Lady’ Celine clutch?

You know, pictures of Taylor have the most peculiar effect on me.

Afflicted with nondescript hair and milky Anglo-Saxon colouring – think  pale-as-an-email after ten layers of Rodial Brazilian tan – she makes me restless to change my appearance.

I should know better.

Twelve years ago, I sat weeping in a hair salon, sorrily clutching handfuls of red hair, pleading to have them cut away. 

The consequence of schoolgirl experimentation – akin to the inspired mania of a depressive before they hit the crashingly shit stuff - it was a period in which my barnet transitioned from Marilyn blonde to every nuance of green inbetween.  One industrial-sized bottle of bleach – and eighteen months of regrowth – later, I considered myself chastised and vowed never again to dabble in the black (red, blonde or brown) arts.

For as long as I remember those mistakes, I will resist Ms. Tomasi’s Titian temptations – has anyone ever done so much for red hair? – but, damn, she makes it hard.

|Street FSN, Jak & Jil, The Photodiarist|