Young Trendsetters Streak Their Hair With Gray
By RUTH LA FERLA2:31 p.m. | Updated
ACTING on an impulse last month, Faran Krentcil dipped her shoulder-length curls into a bathtub filled with Virgin Snow, a pale lavender tint, in the hope, she said, of emerging a “rock ’n’ roll fairy princess.”
Ms. Krentcil, the 28-year old digital director at Nylon magazine, got her wish and then some, her lilac fading within days to an otherworldly gray. A mistake? Sure, but no matter, Ms. Krentcil said. During New York Fashion Week, she stood out like a beacon. “More people took notice,” she said. “I got photographed a lot.”
Her color malfunction had placed her, it seemed, in a league with fashion’s bright young things, affluent trendsetters like Daphne Guinness, who alighted, silver-streaked, on Giles Deacon’s runway in Parislast fall, a ringer for Cruella De Vil; Kate Moss, who showed off “gray lights” at a fashion party earlier this year; and Tavi Gevinson, the 13-year-old blogger and fashion mascot, looking coolly spinsterish in her blue-gray Dutch boy bob during New York Fashion Week.
Also caught up in the silver rush were pop icons like Pink, who showed off gray-tipped strands at the Grammys, and Siobhan Magnus, the “American Idol” contestant, who accessorized recently with a skunk streak and spectacles.
In embracing a tint their mothers would have shunned, such role models are lending gray new cachet, giving shades from ash to ermine an unlikely fashion moment. Now, some say, the trend, which trickled down from the runways of Chanel, Giles Deacon and their rarefied ilk to fashion hot spots around the country, seems poised to go mainstream.
At Whittemore House, a vanguard salon in Manhattan’s West Village, models and bohemian types began asking for gray streaks about six months ago, said Victoria Hunter, an owner, adding dryly, “When one gets on the bandwagon, they all do.”
Sharon Dorram, an influential New York colorist, said that among her downtown New York patrons, it is mostly younger women, renegade types, who request gray. Not lost on Ms. Dorram is the irony that their older, more conventional counterparts spent $1.3 billion to cover their grays last year, according to Nielsen.
Women warming to the arctic look are streaking, tipping or bleaching their hair in tones from Warhol white to Brillo steel. Some are experimenting with color at home, as Ms. Krentcil did, or adding clip-on streaks like those sold online by Eva Scrivo, who tipped the models’ hair gray at the Thakoon show in New York last fall.
Others may part with $200 or more to affect the appearance of the White Queen in “Alice in Wonderland,” or any number of Park Avenue divas.
“These women are showing that they have the money and the inclination to make gray a fashion statement,” said Rose Weitz, a professor of women and gender studies at Arizona State University. Professor Weitz, the author of “Rapunzel’s Daughters: What Women’s Hair Tells us about Women’s Lives,” suggested that to dye one’s hair gray is to flout one of fashion’s last taboos.
For a 16-year-old, it is something akin to having multiple piercings or tattoos, she said. “It takes confidence to pull off the look,” Professor Weitz said. “It’s going to be the head cheerleader who does this, not the nerdy science student.”
Kate Lanphear, a much-imitated fashion editor at Elle magazine, bleaches her hair silver-platinum, a tone, she said, that is meant to read “more subversive than glamorous.” And Agyness Deyn whose platinum crop helped spur the silver-top trend, colored her hair a spectral white for a current Anna Sui advertising campaign.
Paul Mojito, a stylist at Mudhoney on Kenmare Street in Lower Manhattan, said that the frosty tones adopted by Ms. Deyn and his raffish young clients are “all about individuality — and something close to inaccessibility.”
Maybe that’s what Pixie Geldof, the British socialite and model, had in mind when she went gray for a fashion party in London last month, affecting the icy hauteur of a society swan.
Ms. Krentcil, on the other hand, was inspired by a different archetype, “kind of mystic, like Galadriel,” the elf in “Lord of the Rings,” she said. And wicked, too, like her favorite fashion role models, Maleficent, in “Sleeping Beauty” and Cruella, of course.
Gray, essentially an absence of color, can be as practical as it is evocative, Ms. Krentcil added. “Next year I may be over it,” she said. “But if I want to be a redhead next year, I have the perfect base.”
