A Look Back at the New Modern Hair

“If Kandinsky, Mondrian, Miró, and Warhol had a secret colorblind child,” says the biography on Silvia Prada’s website, “her name would be Silvia Prada.” Since 2000, the New York-based, Spanish raised Prada has been combining aspects of Pop Art, fashion illustration, and margin doodling to produce a style of flatly rendered graphite drawing. On crisp white paper, celebrities, models, and musicians traced from magazine images exist, hovering over shapes and patterns that reference the aforementioned early abstract painters.

Late last year, Prada published The New Modern Hair: A Styling Chart with cultureEDIT in Los Angeles, a book and foldout poster with illustrations of male models taken from mid-20th-century barbershop posters. From January 18 through February 26, Prada will have an exhibition of work relating to the publication, using it as a starting point for large-scale drawings, murals, and collages that continue to explore the ideas of male individualism, fashion, and sexuality through hairstyle. Prada, whose father was a barber in Spain, will show her own work alongside contributions from artists such as Slava Mogutin, Collier Schorr, Holli Smith, and Bruce LaBruce in the exhibition at The Pacific Design Center in Los Angeles. Celebrating the ephemeral nature of fashion trends, hairstyles and hair itself, The New Modern Hair promises to offer an intriguing glimpse into the aesthetic history of your favorite ’60s coif. Flat-tops, anyone?