Hairstylist Julien d’Ys: “My Vision Was to Create Artwork”

This article is taken from the Spring/Summer 2025 issue of AnOther Magazine:

“When I came into this business, I never wanted to be a hairstylist. My vision was to create artwork – which is what happened when I began working with photographers like Irving Penn. When we worked on a picture it was like creating a painting – every detail was important. Everything is retouched now but with the pictures we created back then you see what we saw that day. I always, always painted as a child, and I even had an exhibition of my paintings when I was 13, held just outside Paris. In the Nineties I started doing oil portraits of the models I was working with – I think the first were of Kristen McMenamy and Nadja Auermann – and then I kept doing them. It was an extension of my process. I created books of drawings and paintings for each job, my carnets. I think it helped me survive the fashion business, because I’ve always felt more like an artist. Sometimes I did everything – styling, hair, sculpture, you name it. I think it’s because I loved Jean Cocteau and Salvador Dalí, and they did everything – painting, drawing, movies, set design. I’ve never been good at explaining myself in words. I’m not a good talker, so painting and drawing are how I express myself. I have so many books that I’ve filled over the years and now they are like a reminder of everything I did, because sometimes I forget. Back then, I was always on the train, and it never stopped. Now, things are slower and it’s like returning and seeing what was going on in my brain.”

Having grown up in the Breton coastal town of Douarnenez, which he has previously described as “full of fishermen and butchers”, Julien d’Ys took his surname from the mythical city of Ys, said to have been located nearby during the fifth century. According to legend, Ys was ruled by a fabled king whose wayward daughter, Princess Dahut, caused it to be lost to the sea and was subsequently turned into a mermaid with long, golden tresses. Julien d’Ys’s own story, however, begins with him as a young hairdresser at Jean-Louis David’s salon in Paris, where he trained in the early Eighties and tended to the coiffures of Françoise Sagan, Hanna Schygulla, Catherine Deneuve and Madame Claude’s real-life belles de jour. Soon after, he was working with the likes of Helmut Newton, Steven Meisel and Hans Feurer 96 – quickly becoming the go-to hairstylist for Concorde-era designers and supermodels. Notably among the latter was Linda Evangelista, whose long hair d’Ys famously snipped to the nape of her neck towards the end of that decade, helping to transform her career. D’Ys went on to work with the world’s most iconoclastic designers over the years – from John Galliano and Karl Lagerfeld to Rei Kawakubo and Azzedine Alaïa – and is now known for hair more akin to sculpture, ornately constructed from myriad materials, not unlike the haute couture garments his work often accompanies. His supermodel portraits, many of which are scattered throughout his Paris studio, will appear in a seminal tome on his work, to be published next year, alongside his hand-drawn carnets that he creates as part of his process.

Hand-printing: Merrick d’Arcy-Irvine

This story features in the Spring/Summer 2025 issue of AnOther Magazine, which is on sale now.