Heads Up

Amid a drumbeat for inclusivity and individuality, a new class of hairstylists is fusing personal ethos and fashion-world polish to reflect and shape the defining looks of the moment.

- Laura Regensdorf

By the time Holli Smith landed at beauty school in northern California in the nineties, the the neighteen-year-old was already making up her own rules. “I started going to UC Santa Cruz’s campus and cutting people’s hair in the bathroom,” the hairstylist says of an improvisational approach that bucked Vidal Sassoon–style precision. Smith gave herself a Shalom Harlow–esque bob and got a feel for clippers; then, after moving to San Francisco, she began experimenting with self-taught barbering techniques, giving lesbian friends their first identity-defining looks. “Doing things more loosely and freeing everyone’s hair texture was my mission,” she recalls. If that blurred-lines message has now hit the fashion mainstream—where buzz cuts and mophead shags have equal-opportunity appeal—it’s more truth than trend for Smith. “It’s funny because all this gender stuff that’s come up in the world, I feel like I’ve been living it for so long,” says the stylist, who wears her own chrome-streaked hair in a close crop. “I think everyone has something that they haven’t unlocked. That’s the thing I’m always looking for.”