I’ve interviewed Guido backstage during Fashion Week on countless occasions, but I’d never done a cover shoot with him before we met at Chelsea Piers in Manhattan last November. Early on it had been decided that he’d be appropriating looks he created for the spring 2016 shows, but when he informed me that he planned to shoot all of the models in profile, I couldn’t “see it.” How was that going to work, I wondered. I needn’t have worried. Guido is a visionary and what he envisioned was a series of very clinical profiles that resembled the paintings of the Dutch masters, yet also looked as if they’d been digitized, blurring the line between past and future. “You can’t go forward without knowing the past,” he says. “There’s simply no point of reference.” What was important to Guido was that hairdressers understand that when it comes to fashion, the idea is not to literally take what you see on the runway and try to duplicate it but to draw inspiration from it. “Not everything has to filter down for practical application.” For our cover story, he wanted to take old proportions and show them in a new way. Take the bangs on the bowl cut our cover girl is wearing. “At Marc Jacobs they were piecey and close to the eyes, but here they’re above the eyes and kind of rounded,” says Guido, who used Redken Satinwear 02 Prepping Blow-Dry Lotion and Triple Take 32 Extreme High-Hold Hairspray to get the kind of texture he wanted on the cover. “It’s important to find new ways of using products. My job is always to create something fresh.”
Guido’s Must-Have Backstage Products: Redken Satin Wear 02 Prepping Blow-Dry Lotion, Forceful 23 Super Strong Finishing Hairspray, Wind Blown 05 Dry Hair Spray, Triple Take 32 Extreme High-Hold Hairspray and Braid Aid 03 Defining Hair Lotion