Bangs have been something of a focal point at the men’s shows in Milan over the last week, with hair shorn high above the eyebrows into baby bangs at Gucci and Dolce & Gabbana, or styled into swooping side-parts at Fendi. The most seductive hair of the season so far, however, came via JW Anderson.
For the fall 24 runway show, the reliably subversive designer heated the men’s schedule up with a collection inspired by Stanley Kubrick’s 1999 movie Eyes Wide Shut. As Jonathan Anderson told Vogue’s Luke Leitch, it was “the sexiest we’ve ever gone.” This was clear in the sternum-baring cardigans and thigh-smothering tights, naturally, but also in the bedhead bangs: Ruffled up and slept-in, they stuck sweatily to foreheads or dangled across the brow.
For British hairstylist Anthony Turner, who created the looks for the show, the intentionally grubby fringes were a riff on Tom Cruise’s smoothly slicked hair in the erotic thriller, but drew out more of the chaos lying underneath. “We deconstructed it as if it was once neat but now wilder,” he told Vogue. A gappy, greasy-looking fringe might be the bane of any bang-bearer’s life, but Turner leaned into it. “The impression it gives, I hope, is that even something that is taboo can look really cool.”
Achieving the look by blowdrying the models’ hair into neat and tidy side partings, Turner then purposefully destroyed them, tousling out any sense of perfection into something subtly corrupted. “Literally in the line up as the boys were walking out I spritzed them with water and pulled the shape apart,” he said. “It made for some very happy accidents!”
Photo: Armando Grillo / Gorunway.com
It was also a clever extension of the studied seediness of the rest of the collection. Were these bangs that had just come out of a post-coital shower? Or maybe they were the result of a steamy night under the sheets? “It’s fun and sexy, and felt right to do something that isn’t so proper,” explained Turner. “Why is the hair like this? What’s happened? It’s all open to interpretation.”
