Paging: What a Tease!

While Chris Rock and Tyra Banks deconstruct the socio-political implications of “Good Hair,” editor Robert Klanten was hard at work teasing out a collection of art involving human hair for Hair’em Scare’em. In this book, Klanten gathers together wild, woolly and wondrous images of graphic design, photography, illustration, interior design, fashion and jewelery design featuring—hair.

Many of the images originated in extreme illustrations and shoots foreditorial and ads by photographers Paco Peregrin, Kristina Wilson, Ilan Rubin and Philippe Jarrigeon. Though many of these phantasmagorical creations make Marie Antoinette’s pouf appear practical, they pale against the uncanny allure of Stephanie Simek’s necklaces made from false eyelashes, Jason Clay Lewis’s furry hunter’s trophies, Fiene Scharp’s sculpture involving a pat of butter and human hair, and Anna Schwamborn’s extraordinary cuffs and necklaces combining black bone china, gold and post-mortem human hair in the style of Victorian memento mori keepsakes. Most hairy of all is Petros Chrisostomou’s installation of ceiling-high white extensions in Paris’s pristine, neo-classical Galerie Xippas. The locks are extravagantly lush, but they have us by the short and curlies.