Antoinette Beenders, vice president, global creative director for Aveda, is one of the most creative hairdressers working today. She was the first woman to be named British Hairdresser of the Year (in 1999), so when she offered to work with us on this month's cover story, we were very excited. Beenders is famous for keeping something she calls a mood board in her office. On Beenders' mood board you might find pages she's torn out of fashion magazines, images she saw in books, printouts from runway shows she fancied, scraps of fabric, drawings or anything else that inspires her. "It's mainly pictures," she says. The idea, of course, is to find inspiration in the themes that emerge from all of these disparate elements.
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"I've got a lot of ideas floating around in my head, but they don't come to fruition until I see them on a mood board," says Beenders, who credits her husband with helping her figure out how to use mood boards to keep the ideas she gets for one photo shoot from crossing over into another. "I could be working on five different shoots in a short period of time. Mood boards keep me on track."
When she began working on a theme for our photo shoot, she'd been looking at thousands of photos from the fall shows. "I noticed that a lot of designers were going for a 1980s kind of vibe, which made me think about what was inspiring designers who were actually designing in the '80s," she says. "The answer, of course, is that they were inspired by the '20s and '30s. So then I started to think about who the big stars were then. Louise Brooks came to mind. We think of her iconic bob when we think of the '30s, don't we?"
 CLOCKWISE, FROM TOP: One of Tamara de Lempicka's paintings; Antoinette Beenders' mood board for this shoot; an art deco poster that influenced one of the hairstyles Beenders created for us; Beenders with a model and Kurt Hez Lowry, who assisted her on this shoot. |
Beenders also found inspiration in art deco, an international art design movement that was popular from 1925 to 1939, and in the paintings of Tamara de Lempicka, the 1920s artist whose style was referred to as "soft cubism." Beenders saw a lot of androgyny in de Lempicka's work, which inspired the Mia Farrow crop on our cover. Collaborating with photographer Greg Harris, Beenders began coming up with poses she wanted the models to strike, poses that were also inspired by de Lempicka's paintings. She also got the idea for creating veils of hair from the little veils women wore on their hats in the '30s. Turn to page 92 to see how it all came together. —Marianne Dougherty, editor in chief, [email protected]
SALONLIFE IS UNLIKE ANY OTHER TRADE SHOW
If you've never attended SalonLife, you're in for a big surprise. The show, which is designed to help you find balance in your personal life and grow your business, will be held in Chicago at the Donald E. Stephens Convention Center from August 1–3. What's new this year is a trade show floor where you'll be able to check out new products from a variety of exhibitors. The heart and soul of SalonLife, however, is the SalonLife Theatre, where you'll hear keynote speaker Suze Orman, be inspired by Winn Claybaugh, Geno Stampora and Ann Mincey and get business advice from Robert Cromeans, Christopher and Sonya Dove, and Billy and Melissa Yamaguchi. Beauty, balance and business—SalonLife has it all. Visit salon-life.com for more information.