The last person you’d expect to be dreaming up hair products for Zara is Guido Palau. He’s an iconoclast who’s been creating cutting-edge hair for cutting-edge fashion shows and ad campaigns for more than three decades. Just scroll through Palau’s Instagram and fasten your seat belt, because you won’t see any tidy bobs or updos for the ladies who brunch.
Instead, you’ll encounter mullets with snaky Medusa tendrils, Priscilla Presley poufs, ice-blue blunt cuts, cone heads, teased cotton-candy fluff, shellacked Mohawks, fright wigs, unicorn horns, ramen curls, and flying-saucer domes. Who knew hair could assume so many forms? Who knew it could be a sculptural medium?
The first Zara product from Palau made its own kind of wacky sense: a gold hair paint that he demonstrated on Kaia Gerber right before Christmas, as if it were an ornament for the tree. Coming next are six styling products that are remarkable for their practicality. “They’re not going to frighten you,” Palau tells me.
Palau knows how to make basic hair look like more than that. He started his career as an assistant at the Vidal Sassoon Salon in London, the Oxbridge of hair training. “It was kind of hard-core and very, very strict.” It didn’t take long before he was fired for insubordination (specifically, he filled one Saturday’s appointment book with fake names). The boss told him to hang up his scissors and consider another line of work.
Palau paid partial attention to that advice and began styling hair for up-and-coming fashion photographers, landing in British Vogue, where he quickly attracted the right attention. George Michael and David Fincher hired him for the “Freedom! ’90” video. “I don’t know how I even got the job,” says Palau. “I wasn’t ready for it. I look at it now and think, the hair’s all right. But I was winging it. I was out of my depth.”
Who knew hair could assume so many forms? Who knew it could be a sculptural medium?
From there, he collaborated with the photographer David Sims, “doing this anti-glamour grunge thing.” Calvin Klein liked what he saw and hired Sims, Palau, and Kate Moss. And that “was the beginning of being taken seriously in the industry.”
That was also his era of nothing hair, “the bad ponytail, the bad knot with bits sticking out the back,” he says. “The stringy, lank styles”—if you can call them “styles”—“were all meant to be bad versions of hair. Of really questioning the idea of beauty.”
What’s beautiful, what isn’t, and who decides underlie Palau’s output. Much of the time, he challenges conventional notions of beauty, and sometimes he embraces them, pushing them a notch further. And still, he understands that most of us just want our hair to look as good as possible, ideally without a lot of fuss.
He calls the Zara collection the “white shirt and jeans” of hair products. They’re not meant to be “industry insider,” he says. “They enhance what you already have. They’re light enough that they don’t overshadow the hair. You can build them up rather than put one blast in and it’s over.”
He ticks off the primary objectives: volume, shine, calm, curl definition, and nothing that’s greasy or sticky.
The products’ scent is by Jérôme Epinette, the perfumer who masterminded Byredo’s Bal d’Afrique and Victoria Beckham’s new trio, along with Zara’s fleet of fragrances. Each package, designed by Baron & Baron, is slightly different, in bright, unmatched colors; they look as if they came from the Memphis Design collective.
“What people do with their hair tells such a story. It’s the essence of what I love about hair,” says Palau. “Anything can work if you have the confidence—or fake the confidence.”
That sounds like the M.O. of a young apprentice who contributed to a seminal music video and moved on to the runways of Milan and Paris. He’s there now, a comb stuffed in the back pocket of his jeans, bobby pins in his mouth, creating something we haven’t seen before and making it look easy.
Linda Wells is the Editor at Air Mail Look