There’s a distinction that took me a long time to find the words for. It fully landed while I was Vardering at Windle.

Not art. Design.

Art serves the maker. Design serves the person it’s made for, it’s inherently more collaborative. If I’m making art with your hair as my medium the result is exclusively my expression.

Design doesn’t work that way. Design needs to function. It has parameters to satisfy when you leave the chair and walk back into your actual life. Your parameters.

When the word bangs started getting used interchangeably with fringe, I realised hairdressing vocabulary was collapsing. The internet doesn’t seem to be helping here, actually I suspect the opposite. I reckon you could dance your fingers across a keyboard, ask your hairdresser for that, and they’d say, “Oh, is that like a curly-side-curtain-bang?” hoping something might land.

Instead, I use plain English, and although it feels like one of the more unorthodox practices in the salon chair, I’m very much into it. There are people who I suspect are unnerved by this approach. I think they’re the people who just want no decisions to make for a while. They don’t seem to want to be involved, I guess they’re just there to switch off and relax. I hope it doesn’t sound like I’m judging them for this approach. I get it. And I can provide that service but it’s a lot more complex than it might seem, for me at least.

I find the best approach is simplifying the language, and leaning more into the physical demonstration. It means I’m not getting tangled up in vocabulary; I’m communicating with you deeply and accurately. A convenient byproduct is that someone whose first language isn’t English, or who has an idiosyncratic communication style, can follow exactly what’s about to happen without needing to navigate hairdresser-speak. And I think that in itself is evidence that it is a reliable method.

So it looks like this: I hold the hair out from your head at a particular angle. That angle is a decision, which I can propose to you before I commit to it. I can explain what the likely consequences are. Hair being the unique medium it is, I can’t guarantee anything first time. But there are basic principles like the difference between blunt cutting and point cutting. Take a fringe, for example, it can be simply defined, sectioned out precisely and held so you can see what will and what won’t be incorporated. Essentially describing the line as best I can before it exists.

You are not a bystander in this process. You are the person the design is for. That requires you to be able to see what’s being proposed.

This is what thirty years has taught me more than anything else. Not the techniques those come with time and repetition. The communication. The moment when the person in the chair understands what’s about to happen and says, “Yes, let’s try that.” The moment they begin to understand what that actually looks like, how it rests. How what we’ve done this time has our hasn’t worked so we can adjust -or not- next time. That’s the design process as I apply it to hair.