BACKSTAGE: EUGENE SOULEIMAN FOR KEVIN.MURPHY @ CFW

Cosmic textures, sculptural updos, glitter and recycled fabric came together backstage at Collina Strada’s latest collection.

Hair took a decidedly otherworldly turn at Copenhagen Fashion Week, where Eugene Souleiman created the looks for Collina Strada’s Delirium in Bloom PS27 collection for KEVIN.MURPHY.

Presented as part of Copenhagen Fashion Week’s 20th anniversary, the collection by Creative Director Hillary Taymour was built entirely from fabrics, trims, notions and remnants accumulated throughout Collina Strada’s history. Rather than introducing something new, Hillary revisited the past, transforming existing materials through pleating, twisting, layering, patchworking and sculpting.

Eugene took the same approach to the hair, treating it less as traditional hairstyling and more as another material to be manipulated.

“A lot of the inspiration came from intergalactic aerial imagery from NASA’s Hubble Telescope,”explains Eugene. “These incredible landscapes of sparkling gas, intense colour and strange astral formations.”

The result was hair that felt part sculpture, part textile and part cosmic debris.

One of the show’s key looks, Couture Disco, pushed the traditional updo into much stranger territory. Built individually on each model, the hair was prepped with KEVIN.MURPHY FRESH.HAIR and ANTI.GRAVITY before being shaped into abstract, sculptural forms. SESSION.SPRAY was layered through the hair to build structure and hold as the shapes developed.

“Couture Disco is an updo, but it’s the updo after a storm in the galaxy,” Eugene says. “It has this chaotic, abstract weirdness happening within it.”

The finished looks were deliberately imperfect, with no two shapes quite the same.

For the Space Fairy look, the hair was taken in the opposite direction: close to the head, sleek and saturated with shine. And as for the hero product? Eugene used SESSION.SPRAY almost like a gel, wetting and compressing the hair against the scalp beneath a net before adding tinsel and glitter.

“Nothing about this show is halfway,” he says. “Everything is very much in your face, which is what I really like. More is more.”

Perhaps the strongest connection between the hair and the collection came through the materials themselves.

Collina Strada’s archive was given new life throughout the clothing, and Eugene extended that idea to the hair, incorporating fabric from previous collections directly into some of the looks.

“Hillary has revisited elements of her previous collections and upcycled her past, and we’ve done the same,” he says. “We used actual fabric from previous Collina Strada collections and repurposed it within the hair.”

It’s an approach that feels particularly suited to Eugene’s vision of hair as a creative material rather than something confined by traditional salon rules.

“For me, it’s about not looking at hair simply as a hairdresser, but looking at it as a creative and as an artist,” he says. “We’re treating hair as a fabric, which is essentially what it is. We’re taking it out of the salon and sending it into a dreamscape.”

And, fittingly for a collection built around experimentation, the final instruction was simple: “More is more.”

Step backstage with Eugene and KEVIN.MURPHY at Copenhagen Fashion Week, here.