New York Fashion Week Spring 2013 backstage beauty: The secret behind Jessica Stam’s new raven-coloured hair

Backstage at Rodarte, I bumped into former FASHION cover girl Jessica Stam, who opened the show. I almost didn’t recognize her because of her raven hair, which she switched to a few months ago for the Met’s Schiaparelli and Prada exhibit. The shade really seemed to suit the “modern medieval” look and severe side parts Odile Gilbert crafted to appear as though models had shaved one half of their head. “I did it [again] a week ago,” Stam said of her new colour, leaving out the part about it being a cover up for a dye job gone wrong. I received that intel from her long-time colourist Christopher John, who has a chair at New York’s Garren salon. “When she walked into the salon, and I saw her, she said ‘Don’t kill me!’ and I thought what is this?” recalls John of Jessica Stam’s fried, tri-coloured strands. “It took four applications to get the red out,” he said. When adding colour back in the trick was to avoid an opaque “shoe polish” black hair colour. John also applied a Japanese protein treatment to help rebuild her hair. The model and colourist have been friends since 2004, when John was summoned by Vogue to make Jessica Stam a ginger for a Steven Meisel-lensed shoot, where she posed alongside Karen Elson and fellow Canadian Heather Marks—who were both also sporting red heads of hair. Needless to say, Stam will be making a return trip to see him soon. In fact, the next time we see her, John tells me she’ll be back to her natural blonde hair colour.

The post New York Fashion Week Spring 2013 backstage beauty: The secret behind Jessica Stam’s new raven-coloured hair appeared first on FASHION Magazine.