Celebrate
wo r d s d i a n a d e k k e r
P H OTO G R A P H s p a u l m c c r e d i e
G o t h ic
r ev i va l
Wellington hairdresser derek elvy is the architect of a life in which fantastical hairstyles and a home filled with eccentric treasures have become works of art
OPPOSITE: Thoughts of Gothic mystery, bell towers and ravens are personified in Derek’s ancient stuffed crows. They’re menacing but easy to look after, needing just a flick over for dust. THIS PAGE: Derek, unruffled, reads under a Beverly Rhodes painting from her Flower Girl series of a young girl and a large cat. Inspiring books On Derek’s design-tome wish list is Anne Deniau’s look at the life of Alexander McQueen. Derek says McQueen, like John Galliano, ‘‘is gay and inspirational. They just challenge, or challenged in the case of Alexander McQueen, the concept of beauty, like most of the people I’m interested in. They’re also technically really, really clever.’’ He already has Colin McDowell’s Galliano and Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty, the handsome accompaniment to an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. 96 www. nzlifeandleisure .co.nz
NZ Life & Leisure 97
CLOCKWISE FROM FAR LEFT: Bronze whippets guard the entrance to the house; an 18th-century Madonna in a tortoiseshell and ebonized wood frame and a bronze angel from South America keep sober watch; an early Madonna; centuries-old Bulgarian religious painting, restored in Wellington, above vintage spelter ware on a Jacobean sideboard; Chippendale revivalist mirror and sideboard, probably European; spelter turn-of-the-century French urn; heroic small statue.
Derek’s life has been a half-century balance of the esoteric and the pragmatic
t
AMONG THE UPRIGHT, white-painted, box-hedge-fringed residences of Wellington’s Kelburn is a paean to all things Gothic, innocently contained in a modest cedar-clad house. Like the house, the small, wild garden surrounding it is not much to look at from the street but it has been planned and planted over four years by a gardener quite familiar with the Latin names of everything he has chosen. The garden gives immediately onto an interior filled with a dark collection that’s the embodiment of a life devoted to art and graft. The curator of this curious, candlelit world is Derek Elvy, one of the country’s most notable hairdressers, seven times named hairdresser of the year since he first happened into a salon in the 1980s. Derek’s life has been a half-century balance of the esoteric and the pragmatic. The house is perfectly liveable but it’s also virtually a mini museum. And, career-wise, his talents run from the commercially driven to the fantastic. He’s such a clever cutter of ‘‘commercial’’ hair – the get-up-and-go variety – that the list of clients at his salon, Buoy, is closed. Some of his clients have persisted since he first gave them a great haircut 30 years ago. But Derek is also deeply involved with the fantasy side of hairdressing, working with designers and photographers to produce extraordinary images like those complementing the Pacific-inspired garments of Lindah Lepou shown in Wellington’s City Gallery. One hairpiece is like a tower of coral, created from fibres and woven into the model’s own hair. ‘‘It’s part of the story,’’ says Derek. ‘‘It takes the medium into an art form.’’ Derek and the flamboyant Lepou used to be flatmates in Wellington decades ago. So too did designer Kerrie Hughes and Derek; they’ve had a career-encompassing association. He last designed the hair for the models of a collection of Hughes’ bespoke wedding dresses exhibited in Wellington a couple of years ago and the images were carried on Italian Vogue’s blog site. These sorts of photographic exercises are to ‘‘commercial’’ hair what couture is to the run-ofthe-mill fashion industry. They are intended to reach the masses through magazines. 98 www. nzlifeandleisure .co.nz
NZ Life & Leisure 99
100 www.nzlifeandleisure .co.nz
Dark art and objects spread in Derek’s living-room. He admires the work in every one and the thinking processes imbuing them. “They’re not just pretty items. They have, or have had, great status.” He sees the central religious sculpture from Midwest USA, partly charred, as having suffered in the same way as the story it represents.
NZ Life & Leisure 101
Bad memory: As a young hairdresser in Sydney he was coerced by a woman with beautiful long hair, about to be a bridesmaid, to cut it into a radical, short, punk style. He almost left the industry. Good memory: Working as an extra on the movie Merry Christmas, Mr Lawrence in Rarotonga in 1982. ‘‘I’m in this film with David Bowie and Ryuichi Sakamoto, high-profile and influential musicians and the glamour boys of the era. David Sylvian and Sakamoto wrote the sound. They were just stylish, all three of them. I couldn’t have been on a more amazing gig.’’
CLOCKWISE FROM FAR LEFT: Nineteenth-century Jacobean cabinet with victory statuettes and a spelter ware collection by a stained-glass window from a deconsecrated Eketahuna church; from one extreme to the other – Derek in his infinitely light, bright, contemporary salon Buoy; the piano is for other people to play; 18th-century suffering Christ painting, backed with signatures and seals, its provenance still to be established.
Derek needs to be a realist. He manages a business: a salon with a large staff. But he’s also a dreamer, a music lover, a magical gardener and an impulsive collector. The collection of Gothic, Gothic revival, faux Gothic and contemporary art with a dark twist began with his first hairdressing holiday pay. He remembers walking past a black wooden font festooned with carved crocodiles and cobras in the window of an antiques shop. ‘‘I didn’t see it, I felt it as I walked past,’’ he says. It cost about $500. He used his holiday pay as a down payment. ‘‘It’s a Victorian interpretation of what they thought Asia was about. I suspect it’s English but I don’t know. It looks like hand work. It’s dark, it has presence, decadence and elegance, and that’s probably why I like it.” It was the beginning of the collection. “Objects, paintings, music and books inspire me with the photographic work though I didn’t realize earlier how strong that would be.’’ Now he trawls the internet for Gothic pieces and buys from New Zealand artists whose work fits his intense vision. One painting is Wellington artist Beverly Rhodes’ dark portrait of a girl holding a dead cat. ‘‘The child is referring to herself,’’ he offers. He’s waiting for a Mary Mulholland painting of arum lilies. When he finished school, Derek decided to be a chef and studied at Wellington Polytechnic, while working at various city restaurants as a kitchen hand or dishwasher. ‘‘But I wanted to be a hairdresser. I think I always wanted to be, although I had a lot of fun in kitchens. Hospitality and hairdressing cross over. Both are artful, even though in those days food was generic, except for fine dining.’’ He tried everywhere to find an apprenticeship as a hairdresser and finally scored a job in Steven Petherick’s Head of Time. ‘‘Head of Time used to be a men’s barber shop. Steve had transformed himself into a unisex hairdresser – they were slick with attitude. Those were the years when there were a lot of permanents going on, especially with young women, and wedges and classic Sassoon haircuts cut to one length and brushed back, men’s hair half over their ears and flicked back. All pretty ugly, really.’’ Eighties’ hair, he says, was driven by the music scene ‘‘and nowadays it’s driven by celebrity role models”. Modern style is more brand-driven and homogenous than people would like to believe. His own style is ‘‘strong,
avant-garde and edgy’’. Derek had cut his own hair at college, using a comb with a concealed razor-blade to fashion a ‘‘Bowie-esque mullet”. It was the only way to achieve what he wanted unless he went to a women’s salon and that was perceived as less than manly – ‘‘or that’s how my father felt. “As a young man I hated barber shops... the smell... people didn’t wash their hair. As a kid I’d let other people go ahead of me till I could psyche myself up and I didn’t want really short hair.’’ He says he almost didn’t get the job with Head of Time. ‘‘They thought I was gay. I was a pretty boy. It was a good shop, hairdressing the A-listers.’’ He worked and studied again at Wellington Polytechnic. The hairdressing students hobnobbed with the fashion students like Kerrie Hughes and Di Jennings. ‘‘You had the opportunity to interact with other schools. Now you’re exclusively hairdressing. Because of that we became involved with their fashion. Fashion shows need hairdressers.’’ By the time he was managing hair salon Guava in the early 1980s, the music scene was a strong driver of fashion and has always been a strong driver of Derek’s creativity – ‘‘the Düsseldorf electronic effect like Kraftwerk, Bowie, John Foxx, David Sylvian, Ryuichi Sakamoto, Antony and the Johnsons – soporific artists like that”. Derek did a stint as a hairdresser in Sydney, intending to travel on to London, couldn’t save the fare and returned to Wellington. He set up Buoy in Newtown 26 years ago and shifted to the Majestic Centre in Wellington four years later. He’s been in two salons there. ‘‘The first one was Gothic and dark and ominous. The current site is light and airy and contemporary. It’s a glasshouse, probably one of the most spectacular sites in New Zealand.’’ Light and airy. He can do light and airy. But at heart, soul and home, he’s Gothic through and through. NZ Life & Leisure 103