Hair color alert! London has been at the epicenter of nonnatural coloring for quite awhile—but what happens now that everyone’s cycled through every shade of pastel, multicolored locks and dip-dyeing? Well, here’s the latest from the mouth of the oracle, Edward Meadham: Red-red. “I’m really over nonnatural color. I’m into unnatural natural.”
Red hair on the spring Meadham Kirchhoff runway.
You see what he means from these pictures from the Meadham Kirchhoff spring runway. The idea: intensifying colors that appear in nature. That might mean black-black or whitest-blond as well, but the fiery orange-red stole the show—pale faces and ringleted, bow-decorated hairdos, strangely and vividly tumbling over shoulders and contrasted against black-and-white halo hats. Where had that stunning image come from? Meadham says he’d been obsessing about two classic British sources while designing the collection—an odd combustion caused by a collision between David Bowie and Queen Elizabeth I. “I was watching a Youtube video of Bowie singing ‘Sorrow’ from the Pinups album, wearing a white suit, with his red hair. All the colors we used in the show started from that, really. Red and white—period.”
David Bowie
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As they were getting into the collection, he and Benjamin Kirchhoff had also decorated their studio walls with portraits of the sixteenth-century British court. Queen Elizabeth I, Gloriana, with her royal flame-colored locks (inherited from her notorious father, Henry VIII), only allowed herself to be painted wearing black, white, and red in her later life. The splendor of that awesomely powerful image-control (all farthingales and lace ruffs dripping with priceless pearls and embroidery) can be fully appreciated by all visitors to Elizabeth I & her People, an exhibition now running at the National Portrait Gallery.
Queen Elizabeth I
If all of that seems a little historical and far-off, don’t be deceived. Meadham Kirchhoff happened to bring up the subject at exactly the moment ownership of red hair has been a hot political topic in Europe. Part of it’s about Scottish pride. An estimated twenty million people in the U.K. carry the recessive gene for red hair—an estimated 650,000 of them in Scotland, the world's highest rate. The first Ginger Pride Walk took place at the Edinburgh Festival this summer, a good-natured family event organized by Shawn Hitchens, a Canadian comedian. It mirrors the much bigger International Redhead Day, which has been convened annually in the Dutch town of Breda, The Netherlands, since 2005. The visual impact of seeing so many redheads massing together—women, men, girls, and boys—is breathtaking, and lots of fun on a day of affirmation. But then again, the new redhead solidarity carries quite a lot of annoyance with it on the Scottish front. In September next year, the people of Scotland will be able to vote in a referendum on whether their country should become an independent state, separated from England for the first time since Queen Elizabeth’s Scottish cousin, King James I, united the two countries in 1603. It’s no secret that many people in Scotland aren’t that fond of the English.
Prince Harry and Princess Beatrice of York
What luck, then, that the English royal family has its own redhead weapons in the shape of Prince Harry and Princess Beatrice of York at the ready. Admittedly, Beatrice might have inherited her locks directly from her flame-haired mother, Sarah Ferguson—but who knows? That’s the thing about a recessive gene: it could be blue-blooded, Scottish, English, or whatnot. As for the rest of us, why not get that whatnot from a tube?
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