90. Ara Gallant. Hairdressing Hall Of Fame.

Twiggy- flying hair.

Ok, so you watched the video on the previous post called "flying hair" now you can see where the idea came from.

Ara Gallant was born Ira Gallantz in 1932 in the Bronx, but later changed his name because he felt Ara Gallant sounded more exotic. And the life he led was, indeed, an exotic one. Gallant started his career in fashion as a hairdresser, working at Bergdorf Goodman as one of New York’s top colorists. By the mid-1960s he was approached by Vogue and began working exclusively as hair-stylist on photo assignments. In fact, he was the first hair stylist to be paid for such work. Today we call that a "session hair stylist".

Gallant worked with many of the great fashion photographers of the period, Richard Avedon, Irving Penn and Bert Stern, among them. His most notable contribution was the introduction "flying hair" a visual gimmick he first used on an Avedon shot with Twiggy in 1966. The effect is still widely copied today.

Angelika houston

Sophia Loren

By the early 1970s Gallant began shooting picture himself. His first assignment was celebrity portraits for Interview magazine. His work often juxtaposed classic Horst-like compositions with contemporary scenarios. In the early 1980s Gallant moved to L.A. to lead with his friend Jack Nicholson and to pursue a directing career. It never happened, in the 1990's he committed suicide in a hotel room in Las Vegas.

Sissy Spacek

Drew Barrymoore

Ara Gallant

Buy this book. Ara Gallant by David Wills.

89. Thousand Frames Per Second.

In this amazing video internationally renowned hairstylist Sam McKnight teases out the unseen calm in two seconds of a thrashing blonde mane in this slow-motion film shot by photographer Matthew Donaldson. As his model daughter Lily Donaldson spins 360 degrees, her hair buffeted by four wind machines, Donaldson stretches two seconds into two hypnotic minutes, capturing every exquisite movement at 1,000 frames per second. In a world where technology is increasingly maligned for encouraging us to hide from reality, there is a welcome irony here: Using the super-high definition Phantom Gold HD—a camera initially developed for monitoring missile flights—Donaldson distills a hyper-real tranquility. The film is also a paean to Ara Gallant, one of the great session hairdressers of the 1960s and the inventor of the “flying hair” technique.

Watch the video here.