At Length Issue 03 by Prose

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Color Theory

06 The Glow Cutting Edge The Revolution Will Be Personalized A Short Story Another Dimension

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Into the Mystic

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Dream Weavers Childâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Play Main Drag Blonde on Blonde

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founders Arnaud Plas Catherine Taurin Nicolas Mussat Paul Michaux

creative director Rashi Birla

editorial director contributors

Amanda Flores

acting editorial director

Cover Petra Eriksson

Fiorella Valdesolo

Words Diego Hadis Molly Langmuir Natalie Toren Laura McLaws Helms Gina Way Marisa Meltzer Arabelle Sicardi

Sam Stone

Art Giorgia Ascolani Devin Blaskovich Casha Doemland Sara Wong Alexis Eke Tony Floyd Sally Del Castillo Shangomola Edunjobi Alistair Matthews

Emily Bowen

senior designer designer Emily Goodman

photo editor Morgan Young

editorial assistant

A letter from the Editor fantasy, (n); imagination, especially when extravagant and

unrestrained; the forming of mental images, especially wondrous or strange fancies; a supposition based on no solid foundation; visionary idea; illusion; an ingenious or fanciful thought, design, or invention

Childhood can be a particularly fertile period for the imagination; when we are allowed, and moreover, encouraged to let our minds roam and dream and wonder without abandon and, perhaps more importantly, when we have plenty of time to do just that. Those first dalliances with fantasy—the images and stories and songs and characters, both real and imaginary, that temporarily, and blissfully, turn reality on its head—are often imprinted in our memory banks. While fantasy can mean many different things to many different people—a hair color, a fairytale, a wild flight of fancy—it is always, by design, a form of escape; what more ideal way to elude reality than with something that gives it little credence? So it makes sense that in times of turbulence or insecurity, when we are collectively unmoored, that dipping into a world far away from our own serves as the perfect panacea. Fantasy does, after all, have an uncanny ability to neutralize what’s going on around us. Something we experienced firsthand as the world ground to a halt amidst production of this very issue. As our collective realities shifted dramatically so, in turn, did our creative process: the majority of the art you see on these pages was produced while in quarantine. Though fantasy represents an escape from our current reality, it also embodies a vision of the future, which is what made it the ideal theme for this, the third edition of At Length, a magazine dedicated to bridging a connection between beauty and culture at large. We explored fantasy from many angles: its undercurrent in the language of fashion; the mainstream appeal of mysticism and witches, things once reserved for the subculture; futuristic hair as seen through the lens of film; the burgeoning partnership of AI and the beauty industry; the hair color that is the object of more fantasies than any other; children’s interpretations of fantasy hair; how social media has loosened our grasp on reality; and the symbiotic relationship between fantasy and drag. It has been suggested that it is actually drag queens who are the true messengers of what is real. And that is the role of fantasy itself too: in it, we may find a dose of reality.

fiorella valdesolo

C O L OR

THEORY Gina Way talks to experts and lays out the

ground rules for getting the hair color you want— whether it’s super-natural or super-fantastical.

Fantasy Color Embrace a DIY approach The fantasy color trend is easy to DIY with a temporary dye that fades out in a few weeks. “If you have light hair, shades like opalescent lavender or pink will show up nicely,” says hair colorist Aura, who works at Sally Hershberger NOMAD in NYC. Because these pastels disappear on darker hair, brunettes can try deeper hues like iridescent teal green, blue, or purple.

Color key pieces “Apply temporary color onto highlighted pieces to add a little flare around the face, or on naturally lightened ends for a subtle, dipdyed effect,” says Aura. “The ends are a great place to experiment, because you can have them trimmed if you don’t like the results!”

Pink for the win “Pink is the new blonde because it’s flattering for every skin tone,” says Aura, “and there are so many variations, like strawberry blonde-pink, rose gold, beige-y cool pink.” And it’s not just for Gen Z-ers and fairy princesses. Pink hair can be understated and sophisticated: “If you have light hair, try a translucent pink wash to create an ethereal glow.” Aura mixes a few drops of demi-permanent dye with a big dollop of conditioner to make the pigment super sheer.

Photography by Alistair Matthews

At Length

Natural- Looking Color See a pro to make a major change “Going more than two shades lighter or darker, or adding highlights should be done by a professional,” says Meri Kate O’Connor, hair colorist at Tabb and Sparks in Los Angeles. “Things can go very wrong at home if you’re lightening with bleach, and you could really damage the hair.” Choose the correct DIY Formula “If you’re not covering a lot of resistant gray hairs, then use a semi-permanent color. It’s a safer bet since it fades over time.” says O’Connor. Only permanent dye provides total gray coverage, so if you only have a few silver strands, stick with a semi-permanent. Shade match with care When it comes to picking the right shade, it’s the undertone you want to get right. “Your underlying pigment is either warm or neutral, and the best way to gauge that, is by going outside with a mirror. Hints of red or gold signify a warm tone,” says O’Connor. Do a strand test first Unless, that is, you’re touching up with your usual box color. Next, make sure you have everything you need: An old towel to use as a drop cloth, a timer with an alarm, and petroleum jelly to smooth along your hairline, ears and neck to protect from stains. “Section out the hair to make your job easier, and start in the back so the hairline won’t get too dark,” advises O’Connor. Retouch Strategically When retouching gray roots, apply permanent color to that area only. “When you rinse the color out, that will refresh the rest of the hair,” says O’Connor. If you’re touching up with a semi-permanent formula, start at the roots, then pull the formula through the ends for just the last five to ten minutes. “Even non-permanent dye can make your ends look inky after repeated applications.”

Your Maintenance Plan Make it last To ensure long-lasting color, O’Connor recommends waiting three days after your dye job to shampoo. “It takes about 72 hours for the cuticle to fully close and trap in the color. After that, make sure to use a gentle, sulfate-free shampoo that’s formulated for colortreated hair.”

Conditioner is critical “Conditioning is the key to keeping hair healthy and preserving your color,” says Aura. Condition after every shampoo, and use a deep treatment steeped in natural moisturizers such as coconut and avocado oils once or twice a month.

Shield your color Wear protection, such as a hat or scarf, to shield hair from the sun. UV exposure fades and oxidizes the color, which is why brown turns red, and blonde goes yellow/orange. To cut down on those brassy tones, try adding a purple conditioner to your wash day routine.

Color Theory

Collage by Giorgia Mihajlo Ascolani Ckovric/Stocksy

10 At Length

Suspension Writer Molly Langmuir explores the symbiotic relationship between fantasy and social media.

of Belief The first social media profile I created for myself was on MySpace, which I joined when I was in my early 20s. I was often self-conscious in real life at the time, but when it came to posting photos online, I was strangely unencumbered. I certainly didn’t feel the way I do about posting on social media now—like I’m throwing something into an incomprehensible void that could disregard it or could jettison it back at me, with 25-fold-force, combined with appreciation or derision or some combination of the two. Almost twenty

years and four social media accounts later, I have become less self-conscious in my offline life, but uncomfortable to the point of paralysis online. Needless to say, this does not make for great content. In the skeleton of my MySpace profile that remains, there are only four photos, two of which, for some reason, show the same image, in which I’m with some friends, playing with a foosball table we found on the street. But even when the profile was more extensive, it only

Suspension of Belief

highlighted a certain side of my life. I had a clear idea of how I wanted to be seen, though I wasn’t so concerned with my life seeming a certain way as being that way. And this had actually been shaped, circuitously, by a group of loosely interconnected people whose lives were often documented by a few photo blogs I’d started following around then. I’d come across them in one of my early experiences with an online activity I’d ultimately engage in enough that it could almost be described as a pastime—following connections, one person to another, on a kind of Internet walkabout that sometimes led to a dead end but occasionally dropped me into a fullyfleshed out world. They were my age, but wilder, more beautiful, more connected, more successful and also, it seemed, less concerned with any of this in the first place. They lived, invariably, in either New York or Los Angeles which is part of why I spent the summer I was 26 living in L.A. and why, afterward, I wanted to move back to New York, though I ended up in Western Massachusetts instead. The photos prompted in me an antsy feeling, a sort of itchy envy, like there was a spinning world that was out of reach but not entirely inaccessible, and if I could only get to the right bar in the right city on the right night, I’d suddenly be caught up with it too, spinning just as fast. It never occurred to me that the lives I saw those people living online might diverge in any substantial way from the lives they were actually living, and I still doubt they really did. The photos were too candid, and not in the staged candid way of current day social media. The quality of the images was not great. They could be unflattering. People were often sweaty. Sometimes they looked more awkward than they ever would in real life. I am not suggesting, by the way, that life was simpler or less complicated back then. Just that the Internet was. Eventually I lost interest in MySpace, trading it in for Facebook. And eventually I lost interest in Facebook too, especially after the algorithm seemed to decide I would be most responsive to the goings-on of people whose slightly older faces I didn’t even recognize when they passed by in my feed. By then, anyway, I didn’t need Facebook because I had Instagram, the platform that manages to most directly hook into the lizard part of my brain that can’t be touched by conscious thought. It makes me want to leap from my life straight into someone else’s, just like I did back in my early 20s, though the people I feel this way about are no longer untethered and partying too much. Instead, they are skilled but effortless cooks, parents who don’t struggle with getting distracted, women with wide constellations of deep friendships, and people who live in aesthetic homes with comfortable couches covered in perfectly mismatched patterned pillows. I feel this way even as I know that almost no one’s online life offers a full picture of who they are. And that so much of the staged fantasy is driven by a desire for approval, or in Instagram-speak, “likes,” something that will shift in ways I’m not entirely sure of, when the platform soon becomes like-free.

12 At Length

“So much of the staged fantasy is driven by a desire for approval...” I recently started following the Instagram of the guy at the coffeeshop I go to every morning, and discovered that while he’s reserved and self-effacing at work, on Instagram he lifts a shot glass sultrily to the camera on New Years Eve and poses, one hip jutting out, in front of a temple during a trip he recently took with his boyfriend to Thailand. We have spoken, five mornings a week, for at least a year, and I never would have imagined this side of him. Though maybe what we put on Instagram expresses not so much just a side of who we are but something about how we’d like to be seen. In which case, I think the unfortunate truth would be that my Instagram, where I post rarely and reservedly, reveals something that I wouldn’t want anyone to notice about me, which is that I remain more self-conscious about how I’m perceived than I’d wish and still, almost twenty years later, spend too much time calibrating myself in relation to the people around me. I think about getting off Instagram all together, though I haven’t. Instead, I lurk, feeling like all I’m doing is cycling through fantasies. But I’m also not sure why that would necessarily be a problem. I recently went to a wedding of two old friends and, listening to the toasts, was struck by how such events so often demand that we suspend momentarily what we all actually know about the impossibilities of perfect love. When I said something to this effect to my husband later, though, he told me he didn’t see it that way—it wasn’t so much about fantasies as about ideals, he thought, and ideals can be useful. They remind us what we hope for, and what we want. They can orient us. So maybe Instagram has the capacity to do this, too: offer a road map to what I want. Or maybe something about the way it functions, the insatiability of it all, makes it more likely to leave us feeling inadequate than anything else. One request by the bride and groom at the wedding seems relevant to note. They asked that no photos of the event be posted on social media.

Suspension of Belief

The Glow 14 At Length

FOR AWARDWINNING UK-BASED ARTIST SHANGOMOLA EDUNJOBI, MANGA, THE WILDLY POPULAR STYLE OF GRAPHIC NOVELS BORN IN JAPAN IN THE 19TH CENTURY, MAKES FOR AN IDEAL MEDIUM TO TELL A STORY ABOUT HAIR AND FANTASY. The Glow

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The Glow

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The Glow

CUTTING EDGE How cinematic depictions of hair in the future influenced writer Diego Hadis’s vision of his own hair in the present.

From the first time I watched it, in 2005, I was fascinated by the hairstyles in director Wong Kar-Wai’s 2046. The melancholy film tells interrelated stories across several eras: a nostalgic, freewheeling 1960s, and a distant, dystopian, 2046 (the final year before a fictional version of Kar-Wai’s longtime home, Hong Kong, is to become fully integrated with mainland China). In the ’60s scenes, men sport slick pompadours, and women wear their hair in elaborate bouffants. But it’s the more massive, over-the-top hair in the 2046 portions of the film that really appealed to me. In those chapters, the

Photography by AF archive/Alamy Stock Photo 20 At Length

hair is all wild, nest-like structures perched impossibly high atop the head, the ideal accompaniment for the characters’ cyberpunk-esque outfits. I came to think of it as “future hair,” and the moment I saw it, I knew I wanted future hair of my own. It’s often said that speculative fiction reflects the fears and anxieties of its era—but, stylistically, it can embody the fantasies and aspirations of its time as well. In film, this commonly expresses itself through costume design and, especially, hair styling. Take Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner, a

reflection of the cultural struggles of the early Reagan era. One of the film’s main characters, Rachel (Sean Young), is a replicant—a humanlike android. Her entire get-up, from a perfectly coiffed updo to conservative outfits, recalls the femmes fatales of noir films past, but in context her look is orthodox, and defines her subservient role toward her creators. In stark contrast to this hyper-controlled look are the feral hair, makeup, and outfits of a faction of rebellious replicants, led by Roy Batty (Rutger Hauer), with his punkish bleached locks, and Pris (Daryl Hannah), with her blonde mop and kohl-smeared eyes. Of course, future hair appears in many films, once you know to look for it. It’s all over Luc Besson’s The Fifth Element: Leeloo’s (Milla Jovovich) fluorescent shag is the most obvious example, but everyone in the film seems blessed with avant-garde hair, from Korben Dallas (Bruce Willis) to Zorg (Gary Oldman) to Ruby Rhod (Chris Tucker) who has one outlandish ‘do after another. Or consider Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome: Mel Gibson’s title character earned top billing with his power mullet, but Tina Turner and her massive tresses were the film’s true star. That filmmakers often associate future hair with volume may have something to do with the weightlessness of space, or, in the more grounded films, some as-yet-unimagined nanotechnology you can spray on for instantly big hair. On screen exaggeratedly big hair has become emblematic of a particular

vision of the future, a fantasy harbinger of the uncertainty that lies ahead. Not long after I first saw 2046, I brought photos of its future hair—as worn by Tak (Kimuya Takura), a lovelorn wanderer, and the humanoid robot (Faye Wong) who is the object of his affection—to my Japanese hairdresser in New York’s East Village. I wanted to show her what I had in mind when I said my next cut should be “future hair.” She did her best, but the results just weren’t quite as impressive or cinematic as I’d hoped. Of course, it wasn’t until many years later that I realized Kimura’s future hair, as well as that of all the other characters in 2046, must have been a wig. Maybe it will take a few more decades for real hair to catch up to the futuristic vision we have for it.

INTO THE

MYSTIC Photography by Devin Blaskovich Set Design by Casha Doemland

For Kate Williams, witches and magic are not just the stuff of fantasy, theyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;re a way to help make sense of reality.

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“Why is it when a woman is

CONFIDENT

POWERFUL,

they call her a witch?” - Lisa Simpson Let’s talk about witches. The first thing you have to understand is that witches are withered old hags with scraggly hair and warty noses. The second thing you have to understand is that witches are forever-young nubiles with flawless skin and captivating lips. You must know that witches are healers, carers and nurturers who deliver babies, banish illness and dispense advice; and don’t ever forget that witches are simply selfish succubi who destroy lives and will stop at nothing to get what they want. Witches are superficial, consumed with petty concerns, and many don’t think twice about putting themselves in harm’s way to pursue justice, protect the environment, and fight to save humanity. Witches are fictional, and they are very real, and sometimes the fictional witches influence the real ones and sometimes it’s the other way around. In the fictional realm, we’ve fallen under the spells of all sorts of witches, from Glinda the Good Witch (who said ‘Only bad witches are ugly,’ proving that maybe Glinda wasn’t so good after all) to The Craft’s Nancy Downs, Sabrina the Teenage Witch, her highness Hermione Granger, and so many more (sadly, almost all of the most famous fictional witches, with a few exceptions like Bonnie Bennett in The Vampire Diaries, have been white).

Off screen, witches are much more diverse, and include self-proclaimed witches like voodoo queen Marie Laveau; Laurie Cabot, the official witch of Salem, Massachusetts; and the high priestess of Instagram, Bri Luna, aka The Hood Witch. There are also all the women who are so badass that they can’t be anything but witches, even if they’re not selfproclaimed: Stevie Nicks (obviously!), Cher, Michèle Lamy, Lizzo... the list could just go on, and on, and on. But really, what you need to know is that—young, old, selfish, altruistic and every possible combination thereof—all good witches are bad girls. My own journey into the wild world of witchiness started in high school. I was hardly a Lydia Deetz or even a Willow Rosenberg—I was a blonde, tennisplaying yearbook editor—but like many teenagers, I yearned for something bigger, more expansive and mysterious, than drab high-school life could provide. In those years, I frequently had dreams that I would discover hidden rooms in my house, rooms filled with exotic animals and flowers, spellbinding food and music, and parties full of sophisticated revelers clad in only the coolest clothes (a hybrid, probably, of Francesca Lia Block’s books and Angelina Jolie’s epic film, Hackers). Then I’d wake up in my bedroom,

Into the Mystic

my mall-bought clothes strewn across the floor, and realize that it was time, once again, to scrape the ice off my Honda Accord and get to government class. In many ways, I was a traditional good girl—on the honor roll, got along with my parents, well-liked by my teachers—but I still chafed against the conservative nature of my hometown. Sometimes, I felt like I wanted to explode because the world seemed to constantly be telling me to slow down and shut up, whereas I just wanted everything to get faster and louder. Witchcraft was both escapism and a path to power, and on weekends, I trekked to the library or the bookstore, where I would sit cross-legged on the carpet for hours, devouring everything I could find in the metaphysical and new age sections. I read about astrology, and set about learning to do my own chart with more precision than I had ever applied to calculus. I frequented the one occult shop in my hometown, and spent my lifeguarding money on tarot cards and incense (burning so much in my bedroom that it made me cough) while always vowing to save up for a sparkling crystal pendulum (I made $4.15 an hour, so this never happened). I also lapped up any witch pop culture had to offer, and when The Craft hit theaters on my 16th birthday, I took it as a sign (of what, I’m still not really sure). Throughout most of history, witch was a slanderous term hurled at loners and outcasts—usually women—who, through choice or necessity, did not play by society’s rules. These were women who were vulnerable and had no power, or who were autonomous and had too much. Witch was one of those broad terms that could mean

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anything the user wanted it to mean, and labelling someone with it could accomplish any number of things, from social isolation to financial ruin, imprisonment or even death. For so many people, of all genders, in the world today, witch is still a very dangerous word and one not to be used lightly. But the witch switch has flipped in many parts of contemporary Western culture. People—especially women—wear the word proudly, and to call someone a witch is an honor. #witch has been used more than 10.5 million times on Instagram alone, one of the many signs that in 2020, we are witches, hear us chant, in numbers too big to recant. Part of this upsurge in witchiness is, no doubt, because women are tired of the BS. To be raised female is to become acquainted, very early on, with the unspoken rules that surround feminine behavior—be nice, don’t make a fuss, put yourself last, yada yada. That shit gets old real fast, and after thousands of years of it, it’s downright intolerable. Witches, on the other hand, always represented the opposite of this: they spoke up and out, they took care of themselves and each other (covens were the original girl gangs), and they were openly lusty, ambitious and complicated, all things that women were not allowed to be. All of this seems pretty appealing to women who aren’t buying the old sugar-and-spiceand-everything-nice routine anymore. We want snips and snails, because that sounds like a more powerful spell, anyway. Magic has exploded all around us, and not in a frog guts dripping from the ceiling kind of way. Instead, the collective interest has surged in tarot, astrology, crystals and all other forms of magic. A much-cited

2017 Pew Research Study found that 27% of adults now describe themselves as “spiritual but not religious,” and that makes total sense. It seems, to me at least, to be a response to the fact that so many of us are looking at the world around us and thinking “This can’t be all there is.” We feel out of control. We are oversaturated with information that does little to keep us informed, and so we’re looking for our own ways to make sense of it all. We see the disparity between the

world we have and the world we want, and we’re looking for ways to bring those two together. Really, it’s not all that different from being a teenager. I first developed an interest in the occult because little glimpses of magic made me feel like I both had a destiny, and that I could shape it. My life, and my points of view, have changed dramatically since then, but my belief in magic is still there. It’s a phase I hope I’ll never grow out of.

Into the Mystic

How AI is helping beauty brands look to the future.

By Natalie Toren

Illustration by Sara Wong

26 At Length

The Revolution Will Be Article Personalized Name

If the Consumer Electronics Show that took place in early January is any indication, the beauty industry is hurtling towards a dramatic new vision for our vanities; one so laced with state of the art tech it feels positively Jetsons-esque. A mirror that analyzes your skin daily and prescribes a regimen for wrinkles. A hardware unit that brews up custom lipstick colors on demand. A mini inkjet printer that conceals skin blemishes through image detection. While these might be the flashier devices, they echo the clear commitment of the beauty industry to harness the use of Artificial Intelligence. “What’s popularly referred to as AI nowadays first came out of the advancements in academia in 2011 in computer vision,” explains Lisha Li, a former AI researcher and current CEO and Founder of Rosebud AI. “Due to a combination of novel algorithms and architectures called neural networks, we were able to achieve superhuman results in image recognition.” What followed were applications of AI in language understanding and data-synthesized machine learning. While the human mind learns in a linear fashion, machine learning is exponential and constantly and automatically improving—so a computer’s capacity for analysis far outweighs human ability. Machine learning is finding applications across industries, but especially in beauty,

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where technology has the power to drive product decisions, says Li. Heavyweights like L’Oréal, Proctor & Gamble, Neutrogena, and Coty have, in the last decade, invested tremendous resources and built incubators to attract big thinkers, in a race to revolutionize how we interact with our beauty products and tools. And a crop of successful startups, mostly direct-to-consumer, are shepherding us towards a future where our products will be tailor-made.

Try it on ‘Try on’ technology was one of the first major AI breakthroughs in 2015 to innovate the beauty experience. AI algorithms enabled true-to-life face mapping, fused with the Augmented Reality (AR) of three dimensional shade calibration and texture matching. These apps (originally from Perfect Corps and Modiface but now hosted on major retailers like Sephora) capitalized on the lenses of our smartphones, transforming them into smart mirrors. Users can upload an image of their own face wearing actual product colors available for purchase, or hair colored with a drugstore box dye. Not to mention being able to interact with beauty products with a swipe of the finger, like Cher’s virtual closet in Clueless. Increasingly the expectation is that try-on apps will be the industry standard across all online retailers or DTC, functioning to decrease risk (and returns) for the “out of store” experience.

The Revolution Will Be Personalized

Replacing the Pros The advancement of AI is now at the stage where it can generate images, videos, audio and other types of structured data. This means algorithms can now create symphonies, paint works of art, and in some cases assume the role of specialized creative professionals. In 2019, Dazed Beauty magazine, credited an algorithm called Beauty_GAN as coverstar Kylie Jenner’s makeup artist. A bare-faced Jenner provided the canvas for the program to create original makeup looks generated from the machine-learning of thousands of Instagram beauty images. The result: Jenner was transformed into a drippy, psychedelic vision, her features enhanced by bending dimensions of color. Experimental and exciting, applications like this allow us to experience original content that pushes up against our all-too-human parameters. Similarly in the perfume world, AI has eased the burden of labor-intensive creative trials. Fragrance house Givaudan’s Carto AI, is built to be an ultra-competent perfumer’s apprentice, while other companies are investing in AI models to be actual perfumers generating formulas. Li’s startup, Rosebud AI, employs AI to create images of unreal—yet freakishly life-like—models with a customizable and diverse range of features, which she sees as a better alternative to traditional stock photography’s predominantly Caucasian libraries. In these, and many more examples of creative responsibilities shifting to machines, the fear is that the role of human creativity and experience will have to evolve.

Big Data Energy We are a generation raised on ubiquitous quizzes, and now more than ever our self-volunteered answers are being harnessed to build IRL products. Many companies, like Il Makiage and Skylar, have integrated quizzes seamlessly into the discovery process online to sidestep pain points in finding a foundation shade or a personal scent. Prose, which formulates customized hair care for its users, harnesses 85 data points for what it calls “co-creation,” digging down to the effects local tap water may have on your hair by drawing from geolocation data. Curology, Hims, and Hers use webforms to issue telemedicine prescriptions like acne topicals, hair loss treatment, and birth control. The evolution of these algorithms means that all users enhance the experience for each other, creating “products that people want and need and are asking for,” says Priya Rao, Glossy’s executive editor and podcast host. “Truly bespoke potions is a real capability, especially in sub-categories with a narrower set of expectations like sustainable, or clean, where people are looking for answers.” Allowing for a single voice to be heard, or a crowdsourced need to emerge, helps to create a new industry standard of prioritizing inclusion above all else. In this way, AI can help reinforce something humanistic, allowing us to be seen for exactly who we are.

The Revolution Will Be Personalized

New ideas in beauty mean radically new approaches to the tech underpinnings.

We sat down with Nicolas Mussat, the CTO of Prose to discuss personalization, machine learning, and why hair pros still got it. 30 At Length

Q. How did you become Chief Technology Officer at a hair care company? A: Before Prose, I spent ten years building a successful real estate company in France. I was the first hire, and I went from senior developer to CTO. I was yearning to get out of my comfort zone again when a friend introduced me to [cofounders] Arnaud and Paul who were looking for someone to join them at Prose. The pitch was absolutely enticing to me: a new industry to discover and potentially disrupt. We had a novel distribution model of highly personalized products and an extremely consumer-centric and data-centric mindset. There was an interesting network effect where everyone enhances their own product and in doing so, participates in the greater good. I was hooked pretty quickly. Now I oversee our team of developers and make sure the digital roadmap we’ve set is delivered on time, with high quality and innovation. We’re lucky to have a few sandboxes in which we can play with new technologies, like with the physical orders processing workflow or with computer vision algorithms on which we can build customer-facing features.

Q: Talk to me a bit about personalization and innovation at Prose. A: We think that personalization must become the new standard, especially when it comes to beauty. We don’t believe all the world’s diversity can be served with a few dozen formulas stashed on a shelf: it always comes

down to a compromise for the customer and it ends up with landfills of unsold products, which is a pure shame. On-demand personalized hair care means an infinite catalog of products. Likewise no off-theshelf software can easily cope with this complexity. In practice, this single massive constraint has led us to rethink and redesign almost every part of the experience, from the consultation to our formulation algorithm, the personal hair care routine recommendation and the ability to fine-tune formulas order after order.

Q: How did you make a questionnaire that can point to the real needs of all customers? A: The questionnaire feeds the Prose Algorithm which results in the creation of formulas. It is built in part with the guidance of the R&D team in Paris (composed of leading hair care specialists), and with machine learning models for clusterization and segmentation. Each question in the webform is weighted to have an impact on your final product formulation. Our approach is not to replace human expertise with machine learning, but to enhance expertise with new insights. This new set of tools allow us to comprehend gigantic datasets the mind can’t even apprehend. Knowing the precision with which our formulas are made, the sheer amount of science involved, and looking at our customers’ reviews, I know for a fact that some people’s needs weren’t being served before Prose.

A Short Story How a radical, and entirely unexpected, beauty school haircut redefined Christine Whitneyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s relationship with her appearance. Since before I learned to speak, I had a very specific idea of how my hair should look: Long, thick, and supermodel-esque, cascading effortlessly past my shoulder blades. My inspiration was derived partially from Andie MacDowell flipping her thick tresses around in shampoo commercials, partly from the children on Sesame Street with their long ringlets. At any rate, my reality was quite different: fine, slippery strands that yielded only a wan ponytail or flaccid braid, at best. My childhood and teenage years were marked by a series of unremarkable haircuts. Each time I showed up at the local New Jersey hair salons, I expected to emerge transformed, my hair billowing and resplendent. Each time I was disappointedâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;I was still me. Eventually, I opted out of the whole experience and started cutting my own hair, which still, perhaps unsurprisingly, never produced the transformation

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I was after. And then one day, on the streets of New York City’s West Village, my destiny changed. I was 23, and was skulking around with a long mullet of sorts that I’d fashioned with a razor blade, a failed attempt to replicate the look worn by many a New York woman in the early aughts, when a heavily-tattooed young man pointed at me. “Do you want a free haircut?” he said, “I need a hair model.” Yes, yes I did. At the time, I was working for $10 an hour as an intern at HarperCollins, so I loved anything with “free” in front of it, plus being a model of any sort sounded terribly glamorous. The stylist’s name was Jordan M—that’s right, just M—and he was a student at a salon uptown. I went to see him on my internship’s lunch break. I sat awkwardly in the chair as he and his instructor contemplated my homespun haircut. The next thing I knew, most of my hair was gone, and what was left was scalp-short and intentionally asymmetrical. I felt as naked as a shorn cat. I longed for a hat, or at the very least a hood. Suddenly, all I wanted was my mediocre, shoulder-length hair back. Burning with shame, I slunk out of the salon, but a funny thing happened on the way back to my cubicle. The editorial assistants and other interns were all atwitter about my hair. They loved it. And after the initial shock wore off, I began to love it too. Jordan became my go-to haircutter. Over the course of my twenties, he dispensed a motley assortment of short crops that unexpectedly became my beauty signature: bowl cuts, pixies, graduated bobs. Sometimes the back was shaved, sometimes just one of the sides. I thought I’d always wanted Brigitte Bardot, but, as it turned out, my ideal look was more Jean Seberg in Breathless. And short hair unexpectedly suited me. It was, as people continued to tell me, editorial. Jordan also became one of my closest friends, the kind that I could call at midnight after I’d butchered my bangs with my trusty razor while he was away at Paris fashion week. Upon landing back in New York, he executed an admirable repair job at 1 a.m., saving me a lot of explanation at work the next day. (It seems I’m not actually good at cutting my own hair, and that structured haircuts, unlike mullets, require the intervention of a professional. Do not try this at home.) In my thirties, I moved across the country, got married, had a baby, and, much to Jordan’s chagrin, grew my hair out. Being away from the longtime gatekeeper of my short cuts was part of the reason, but they also suddenly came to feel like a visual marker of a chapter of my life that I had graduated from. While my hair is no longer short, what remains is something more impactful than any half-shaved coif I ever sported: a profoundly changed relationship to my self-image. Those narrow conceptions of beauty I once held to be true were just that—narrow. It’s a lesson I don’t think I would have received if it weren’t for that decade of short cuts, and one that I’m passing onto my daughter. Her hair? It’s short, for the time-being at least.

A Short Story

Another Dimension Hair artistry at its most over-the-top and wildly inventive is often simply no match for its virtual counterparts: the digital landscape, a place dominated by vanguard filters, is where fantasy hair is truly allowed to flourish. What would hair with no basis in reality look like? Perhaps winged or feathered, tentacled or camouflaged, spiked or crystallized. This is hair as alternate reality. Illustrations by Alexis Eke

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Polished orbs in a variety of sizes and hues are woven together to form an ornate assemblage of hair jewelry.

Another Dimension

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A banded and tentacled ammonite-like swirl of hair fit for a slug cabaret.

Hair spreads its wings in this insect-inspired dreamscape.

Another Dimension

A constellation of geode-style spikes offer protection both literal, and metaphysical.

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Lush blooms and verdant leaves take root from head to lashes in this fantasy hair garden.

Another Dimension

Dream

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When the news is grim, fashion can serve as the ultimate escape. Fashion historian Laura McLaws Helms threads the needle between fantasy and reality. When life gets too overwhelming, when society seems to be careening towards a breakdown and even when war looms overhead, fashion has often reacted by escaping into fantasy. And, frankly, so have I. The night of the election in 2016 I was filled with such foreboding that I attired myself to battle uncertainty and the unknown in a navy high-neck, Edwardianstyle dress by Jean Varon—prim and proper as the era it recalled from the front, but with a completely open, dangerously low back. While my dress did not change the election results, I did meet my future husband that night. And during particularly difficult news weeks I find my dress becomes more fantastical, more out there—one day a Grecian goddess by way of the late 1970s, the next Laura Ingalls Wilder. I’m not alone in my proclivity for finding solace in fantastical fashions; in fact, it’s a sentiment widely embraced by shoppers all over. Dreaming, sartorially at least, in times of strife can provide for many a sense of relief. While fashions in crisis times are rarely defined completely by makebelieve, there has consistently been a resurgence of fantasy-focused trends during those periods. Nostalgia,

exoticism, futurism, fairytales and dreams all coalesce in the world of fantasy fashion. Think of the Industrial Revolution—a time of rapid change and innovation, grim factories and poor labor conditions. While many welcomed this new industrialized future, others were left wary and unsettled by the social, moral, and aesthetic chaos. Their response? A wish to return to idealized days of yore.. Wearing a loose velvet Renaissance gown over an uncorseted body was both a political statement and a nostalgic fantasy response to a world that seemed to be changing too quickly. Similarly, fashion’s response to war has repeatedly been a reawakening of theatrically dramatic styles and an emphasis on prettiness. While both World Wars were marked by strict government guidelines regarding clothing production and fabrics—bringing about trimmer, more restrained silhouettes—this comingled with a desire among women for beauty and fantasy. Towards the end of WWI Vogue explained this predilection: “When we are no longer feminine, when there is no more of lace and frills and loveliness, then indeed the world will be a sad place.”

Dream Weavers

The same magazines that extolled the importance of “the three P’s— preparedness, politics, patriotism,” also featured romantic, ribbon-embellished frocks of white chiffon, organdy and voile. The increasing volatility of Hitler and Nazi Germany would again have designers plundering nostalgic pasts and light-hearted themes—the late 1930s haute couture gowns of Marcel Rochas echo the full-crinolined shapes of the 1850s, while Molyneux and Mainbocher both revitalized Belle Époque gigot sleeves and high-necks. Perhaps more than any other, designer Elsa Schiaparelli—Coco Chanel’s greatest rival—understood the need for fantasy during times of peril. The six themed collections she presented between February 1938 (a month before Nazi Germany annexed Austria) and April 1939 (when Paris was already mobilized for war) all reflected a theatrical creativity that showed her unbowed by the idea of imminent battle.

Designs by Elsa Schiaparelli, MAD, Paris/Jean Tholance

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For her, this was not a time to fear but a time instead to revel in the magic of our world by looking to things like the circus (summer 1938), pagan myths drawn from Botticelli’s paintings (fall 1938), the Sun King (winter 193839), or the 18th-century Commedia dell’arte (spring 1939) for inspiration. And producing fantastical garments like a see-through jacket buttoned with tambourines, an evening bolero festooned with dancing elephants and acrobats, and a cape embroidered in gold with Versailles’ famous Neptune Fountain. Schiaparelli’s late 1930s collections still stand apart as clear examples of creative defiance and would serve as inspiration for Franco Moschino’s subversive Surrealist reaction to the AIDS crisis many decades later. Decades later, the immense cultural and social shifts of the 1960s coupled with the Vietnam War produced a climate of fear and anxiety, and fantasy and drama provided a safe space amidst all the complex changes. Members of the counterculture chose to “turn on, tune in, drop out” and wear an assemblage of vintage and ethnic dress that signaled their discontent with normal society, and young fashion designers like Ossie Clark, Zandra Rhodes and Bill Gibb in London, and Giorgio di Sant’Angelo in New York, reflected these values in collections that burst forth with originality, combining Native American buckskin detailing with Medieval silhouettes and Art Deco

textiles or a shockingly sheer Arabian abaya printed with Art Nouveau lilies. And today? In times of strife, there remains a sense that designers’ collections should serve as a response.

Haute couture will always be a world that emphasizes escapism and spectacle— from the futuristic, completely innovative fantasias of Iris van Herpen to Guo Pei’s history-laden “alternative universe” to Alexandre Vauthier’s Dynasty-inspired sex kitten—over wearable styles no matter what is happening politically, whereas in ready-to-wear, more designers use their garments as politically charged messages (such as Pyer Moss’s designs celebrating Black culture, Demna Gvasalia’s spring 2020 collection for Balenciaga of shapeless power dressing, and every recent designer tee emblazoned with political catchphrases). Luckily, many designers still understand that we the customers need an escape from our current

Design by Iris Van Herpen Illustration by Nastya Kuzmina

collective anxiety. And sometimes that escape is a gleaming gown composed of only gold fringe (like the look that opened Christian Dior’s spring 2020 couture show). Or a Brock Collection floral silk corset gown that is the very incarnation of 18th-century pastoral prettiness. Or one of Area’s sparkly printed chain-fringe dresses that seems ideal for a futuristic disco party. Or even one of Gucci’s eclectic and colorful ensembles, quixotically styled by its dreamer-in-chief Alessandro Michele. So, throw on your sequined milkmaid dress—I’ll be wearing my grey panne velvet Medieval gown— and you just might find your mood so lifted that you’re ready to take on the evils of our age.

Dream Weavers

CHILDâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;S If you could design your hair to look however you wanted, would your hair have... Magic powers

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ecial abilities p S ?

Collages by Tony Floyd Illustrations by Sally Del Castillo

If so me thin g else took the plac e of

yo u

hair what

wo uld it b e

and why? Childâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Play

â&#x20AC;&#x153;I would want it to grow down to the ground and lift me up so I could slam dunk a basketball on an NBA hoop. I love basketball.â&#x20AC;? Jack, Age 10

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“It would be for it to have the same magical powers it has now! My hair has the ability to do things other people’s hair cannot do. You can braid my hair and it will stay beautifully braided longer than anyone I know! My hair has multiple color rays such as blonde, red and brown. My hair gets very curly when you wash it and it magically turns into an afro when it dries! My hair is easily straightened with a blow dryer and flat iron. Like magic, it goes from sassy curly to luscious straight in seconds! I love the superpowers my hair has. I wouldn’t have it any other way!” Mimi, Age 10 Child’s Play

â&#x20AC;&#x153;I would want it to be a magical garden that would grow all kinds of beautiful flowers. People could make a wish for something good and take a flower and their wish would come true! The flowers would brighten their day and would make everyone happy because they would be a symbol of shared goodness in the world. The flowers that grow from my hair could be planted and start new magical gardens everywhere. It would spread and spread and the world would be more colorful and beautiful.â&#x20AC;? Ava, Age 10

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“It would be able to make me fly! It would be in the shape of a mohawk. It would look like a wild bird! It could turn into wings and lift me into the sky and it would fly back and forth from here to New York City and see all my family. They would see me from their apartment windows and way below me on the busy streets flying past and be so happy that I was coming. I could see everything from up so high and I could fly to see them anytime I wanted.” Vince, Age 10

Child’s Play

Photography by Off White Productions/Everett Collections

MAIN DRAG

The fantasy of drag, as writer Arabelle Sicardi discovers, has little to do with beauty.

One of my favorite high school memories was when a six-foot-five drag queen stopped me on the way out of the library and informed me I was a “fashion plate.” This radiant Amazon had a neon yellow wig, calves that could crush a coconut, and the most immaculately arched eyebrows I’d ever seen. She told me I looked cool, and handed me a promo card for her next performance. Speechless, I took it. I didn’t know what “fashion plate” meant at the time… I had to ask the librarian after the queen swanned out. Which, when she did, everyone in the library shared a glance of loss. In that moment, as a baby queer, I realized the amount of stuff I had yet to learn was immense: queer turns of phrase, yes, but more importantly, the understanding that audacious beauty has the means of possessing a room. I would attend my first drag show shortly thereafter. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word “drag” has been around since 1388, but it was in the 1800’s that it became associated with gender-bending performance. Male actors would perform as women, and their petticoats would drag on the floor. But since

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the early 1900’s, the term has been used by queer folks in reference to performance regardless of gender. During the Harlem Renaissance, drag kings like Gladys Bentley emerged. Drag balls became popular as a means of entertainment, and over the next few decades, drag wrote a rich cultural history through documentaries, festivals, local performances and, eventually, television shows. Drag has enough styles and techniques to require a style guide: you can be fish, a pageant queen, goth, club, skag, androgynous, camp, the list goes on and on. It is a competitive culture, but also a familial one—generations of queens foster each other in chosen families and defend each other. “It’s a culture that has its own language. When you watch your first drag show, nine times out of 10 you don’t really get it. It’s a barrier of entry, to not understand it upon first impression, but you’re not supposed to. Otherwise, it wouldn’t be queer,” explains Fran Tirado, former deputy editor at OUT magazine, occasional drag perfomer, and co-host of a queer, drag-centric party with popular drag queens West Dakota and Dynasty. “A drag queen doesn’t need to be beautiful. They don’t have to be expensive looking, they don’t have to be lip syncers—they don’t even have to be funny. But they do need at least one of the four pillars: charisma, uniqueness, nerve, and talent. The combination makes drag artists some of the most important and

undervalued entertainers our culture has to offer.”

CHARISMA. UNIQUENESS. NERVE. TALENT. These are the four pillars of a good drag artist—you’ll note that beauty is nowhere to be found. Curious, then, that the most exemplary drag artists around happen to be so talented at beauty. Many of them have started their own companies or collaborated with established ones, with widespread success all around. Both the beauty industry and drag fans are drawn to the skills and authorship these artists bring to the table. They’ve created a culture that isn’t really about a glamorous, “believable” performance of womanhood—instead, it’s about finding a way to take charge of the room, tell a story, and do it well, regardless of what you started with. Ultimately, that’s the most timeless definition of what beauty does, too—it makes you stop and admire it, while it figures out what it wants with you. Drag artists perform this power move better than the rest of us, reminding us of the cleverness of appearance, of the infinite variety of presentation, of the bravery of commitment, and of the fact you don’t ever need to be conventional to be the most magnetic person in the room. Beauty just isn’t the most important part.

Main Drag

Blonde on

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The most emblematic hair color of them all? Writer Marisa Meltzer traces how

vehicle for fantasy

her own hue came to be a

You can’t just be blonde, you have to be a blonde. There’s no way to have hair in shades of flax or platinum or even bathwater—by birth or by choice—and not have people assign meaning to you. Blonde hair has always been charged with significance. It has its roots in the most primal of experiences. “Things that are light we go to and things that are dark we avoid,” says Natalia Ilyin, the semiotician who wrote a memoir and study called Blonde Like Me in 1999. “Lightness is related to life and spring. And it was a rare commodity; less than 2 percent of people are born blonde.” Most people have hair that darkens as they grow older, so blondes were considered childlike and innocent. Think of the blonde heroines of fairy tales or Giotto’s paintings of angels and Christ with locks the color of gold, that precious metal. But it was the silver screen that made being blonde go from simply unusual to something like a fetish. Actresses went blond because it helped them stand out and, more importantly, it could be seen on film much easier than any other hair color. There were so many kinds of blonde! They no longer had to just

represent one thing; they could become vehicles for a multitude of fantasies. There was Mary Pickford (innocent), Jean Harlow (tough), Mae West (bawdy), all of Hitchcock’s icy blonde headliners, from Grace Kelly to Janet Leigh to Kim Novak, one frostier than the next. The most blonde of them all was, of course, Marilyn Monroe, star of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. So intertwined with the color was Monroe’s persona, that when Joyce Carol Oates wrote a novel about a film icon based on her, she would call it simply, Blonde. Brands and the advertising industry solidified the blonde fantasy. From the 1950s, Clairol, the hair dye company made going blonde something one could do at home (with potentially brassy results). So the girl next door? She could be a blonde too. Their ads had women famously declaring, “If I’ve only one life, let me live it as a blonde” and asking, “Is it true… blondes have more fun?” When Jean Nidetch, the founder of Weight Watchers, lost 80 pounds in the early 1960s, the final step of her transformation was dyeing her hair platinum, a shade she maintained until her death in 2015. Greta Gerwig,

Blonde on Blonde

a natural and thoughtful blonde, if there ever was one, once complained that it isn’t always easy being a blonde onscreen. “It’s hard in big films not to just serve the function of being decorative, or a goal for the male protagonist who’s doing all the interesting things.” Which is why, perhaps, some actresses who were born blonde, choose, instead, to go darker: Angelina Jolie and Sofia Vergara are, in fact, natural blondes. We’ve also always been presented with the blonde-brunette divide, pitting them against each other. If brunettes were passionate, blondes were pure; if brunettes had their heads in books, blondes had their heads in the clouds. The rivalries are etched in our culture: Betty and Veronica, Jackie and Marilyn. The 1980s and 1990s had a lot of them for some reason: Krystle and Alexis on Dynasty, Brenda and Kelly on Beverly Hills 90210. In Pretty Woman, Julia Roberts’s Vivian character is both light and dark haired, but it’s a flip of the old blonde as innocent trope. Initially, she’s a sex worker in a platinum wig. It is only when we begin to see her open up, revealing her “real” self, does the wig come off. The message is that the fantasy was over and now the real woman could emerge. While for superstar blondes like Beyonce and JLo and Madonna and Mariah, the real woman and the fantasy image tend to overlap. Part of what makes blondes so fertile for fantasy is their ever-changing associations. In 2017 Dr. Jennifer Berdahl and Dr.

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Natalya Alonso, professors at the University of Columbia’s Saunder School of Business, presented some research about hair color. They observed that there appeared to be a high percentage of blonde women in leadership positions. They found that 48% of female CEOs at S&P 500 companies and 35% of U.S. female senators were blonde. So they surveyed 100 men to gauge their reactions to blonde CEOs versus brunette. They were rated the same in attractiveness but the brunettes were considered to be better at leading a company. The blonde leaders were assumed to be younger and more docile than their brunette counterparts, which Dr. Berdahl and Dr. Alonso interpreted to mean that blonde leaders could get away with more aggression than brunettes. Perhaps this also has to do with the abundance of blonde tv anchors at Fox News? The blonde stereotype has not simply evolved from one thing to another, but is constantly shape shifting, refracting and bouncing off current ideas of womanhood the way light bounces off blonde hair. You can be a nurturing blonde yoga goddess type, a cunning cheerleader, an influencer mogul. The more something can mean, says Ilyn, “the stronger it is in our culture.” Which is why so many people choose to go blonde. But blonde may be an addiction, even for those who are born with it. When Gerwig was told as a child that her own hair would likely get darker with age, “I became uncontrollably sad,” she said. “I just couldn’t believe it.”

Blonde on Blonde

At Length

Article Name

At Length is a quarterly magazine created by Prose. The publication explores the intricacies of hair and all of the ways in which it influences our culture, our daily lives and our personal choices.

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