INTERVIEW: IN CONVERSATION WITH ANTOINETTE BEENDERS

Following her headlining act in front of the 950-strong audience at MANE STAGE 2024, and claiming the title of Icon of the Year the following evening at the 2024 AHFA Gala, we had the immense privilege to sit down with the one and only Antoinette Beenders at Aveda HQ to deep dive into her inspirations, collaborations and enduring love of the Australian hairdressing industry.

TJ: Congratulations on winning the 2024 AHFA Icon of the Year, and it was such an honor to have you headline MANE STAGE this year. Can you chat us through the creative process behind putting the show together?

AB: The way I start the process with shows is to approach it as a storytelling process, and asking myself – what do I want to share? I have been working a lot with AI, and then I thought, Okay, well, why don’t I just show them how I have done some of my looks, how I think or how do I do my thing? I decided to divide this show up into five sections. The opening section was an AI created movie by someone in Paris that also does AI for Chanel, and I met him through Iris van Herpen – it’s the very highest level of AI that you can do. It was really about creating a natural world and showing AVEDA in a light that perhaps not has not been seen before. I called my show Knowledge of the Whole, because that’s what Aveda means. We are knowledge of the whole, not just knowledge of the head. 

Clothes are very important to me as well. In this particular case,models were wearing dresses made out of paper, those flowers made out of paper, made by a girl in Minneapolis who I met during Black Fashion Week. I’m like, Oh my God, I need those in my show. So I commissioned her to do the baby dresses – they’re actually firstly seen here on stage in Australia!

TJ: Amazing. How did you get them here?

AB: I vacuum packed them! I also brought my production team in from the UK, my choreographer from the UK and my American hair team – all the hairdressers that worked on that show are already award winning hairdressers. I have the most incredible team – I mean, I got really good peeps.

In the next section of the show, we explored a collaboration I did with X-presion on a hair colouring technique, which we’ve won a tonne of awards for. We’ve never really shared how we did it so I made those canvases to show people how we did it. We also really focused on vegan hair color, and emphasising that you can get bright colours with plant based hair colour. A lot of people go – oh, you can do that? Yes, you can. 

And then we went to the Stella McCartney section, which is also part of a collaboration. I feel like the whole show was kind of part of collaborations, because the expression thing then Stella, which I do a lot of her shows, brought in spring summer, the real stuff with me spring summer collection and the trends. What we’re looking forward to like, let’s do a bit more hair cutting. Let’s protect our craftsmanship, because if we lose that. Then we went on to Iris and Herbert, which was also about a collaboration that we did with her, and showcasing a way of styling which is perhaps a little unusual but fun at the same time. And then I gave away the boards, which they nearly killed each other, but I will be sending some boards over to Australia for the Avada hairdressers. So if you are wondering. And then I finished with astral, which is also a collaboration with my AI guy engineer at Maximus, but also you see the orc that the models were, that was something I just got from New York Fashion Week. I work with a designer called Bad binge, Dong Tong, who’s a Chinese designer based in New York, and he created this whole futuristic thing, which then totally blended in with my astral So, and Astro is a collection I was originally the technique, the clamping technique, I designed for Iris van herpens Couture show in Paris. But then I took it further and created astral. So astral was an experiment, and then our experiment became another experiment, and then I ended up with videos like this. Yeah, that’s it in a nutshell. Yeah, I love creating. I know that AI is scary and it’s new to everybody- especially new to hairdressers who’ve just come out of a pandemic and are still trying to get their businesses back to what they want. My basic message? You need to embrace it (AI). I’m not saying to create hair with AI- keep the craftsmanship, but adapt your services, systems or other things. Start working with it, because otherwise you left behind.

TJ: That actually leads me perfectly into my next question. You’ve mentioned embracing AI and new technologies with the Astral collection. What would you say to hairdressers looking to embrace it, and how can they harness these new technologies?

AB: I am a firm believer that we need to ensure we keep the craftsmanship. Because if we start creating hair with AI, then yeah, we might as well start doing something else. 

But the beautiful thing about craftsmanship is we as hairdressers are very powerful, because we have power of touch. It’s your touch that really makes that client want to come back to you, and makes them tell you all their secrets. A computer can’t do that, not for a while at least. 

Don’t be scared. Embrace it, and go with it. So I say experiment a little with video, experiment with clothes- because clothes are always hard to get – but keep the hair and the models real. I really believe in the future that we’re going to look at hair typing in AI systems, to make it faster.

TJ: Now that the AHFA Weekend is over, what else have you been doing whilst in Australia?

AB: I’ll tell you what I did yesterday – my beautiful Aveda Australia family sent me for a chakra balancing treatment. I walked in half dead, and I came out like a new person. It just made me human again.

TJ: What is it that you love about Australian hairdressers? 

AB: Oh, I just love Australia in general! I’m obsessed with botanicals, plants and nature, which is something I learned at Aveda. You guys live in that, so I’m very jealous. I mean, look at your native plants – unbelievable. 

But what I love about Australian hairdressers is the passion and energy that they have for their craft. They’re so enthusiastic, and so willing to learn – just lovely, lovely, caring, nice, gentle, gorgeous. I’ll give you an example. The lovely Jayne Wild – who’s been Australian Hairdresser of the Year that many times – reaches out to me on Instagram, and offers to help with anything I needed… So she lent me all her tools, because I didn’t have an Australian kit, and ended up taking me for lunch!

I would love to call Australia my second home, or my emotional home, because I feel very appreciated when I’m here. I feel very blessed and grateful to come here and meet everyone and yeah, and I feel like I said it today, but thank you for giving me the opportunity to share my passion.

TJ: You’ve been with Aveda for almost 30 years now (27 to be exact). What do you love most about the partnership?

AB: They bring the best out of me, they take care of me. And I love that they’re willing to walk the talk. Aveda has so much knowledge of plant innovation, because we’ve been through the tough time of having to prove that plant based hair care works. We are now in the beautiful position of having high performance plant based products that work.

I don’t think people realize the science that goes into our product – tremendous knowledge and scientific innovation that goes in. Like, we use biotech to take extracts of different plants to create a complete new molecule. 

TJ: What’s next for Antoinette Beenders?  

AB: I’m absolutely committed to exploring new horizons of artistry. I think once you’ve been in the industry as long as I have – 40 something years – it’s important that you look at new technologies and outside collaborations. Whether that’s fashion, whether it’s art, whether it’s AI.