Sassoon Academy Collection SS10/ Ga Ga Dolls

Dada, an anti-art movement in the eye of the storm spawned in a culture of annihilation. Fleeing the carnage of the First World War a straggling group of disparate artists, poets and performers took refuge in the neutrality of Switzerland and kick-started an international art revolution.

Chaos met creativity at the launch of the Cabaret Voltaire on February 5, 1916, an avant-garde nightclub in Zurich, and centre of the Dada cause. Artist-agitators Hugo Ball, Emmy Hennings, Hans Arp, Tristan Tzara and Marcel Janco took visual language to Year Zero by destroying in order to create. Their celebration of the irrational took the form of abstract collage, cacophonous performance, experimental film and sound poetry inspiring a generation of young artists such as Hans Bellmer who posed fragmented Dolls in a series of uncanny mise en scene, the indomitable modernist poet Mama Dada aka Gertrude Stein and the sexually ambiguous photographer Claude Cahun whose Bohemian blonde crop anticipated punk by a full fifty years. Such Dada icons inspire this season's cuts combined with an edgy eighties hard times chic. Off-kilter cuts are deliberately staged to give dramatic contrasts in volume and texture. Candlestick perms create clouds of candyfloss that sit with exaggerated effect next to tailored, fitted bowl shaped panels that are intricately cut from long to short. ‘There’s an exciting unexpectedness about this combination of opposites’ says International Creative Director Mark Hayes, ‘Haircuts are eccentric, bold statements which break traditional rules in the same way as the dada artists were re-inventing art.’
Stein’s poetic fragment ‘Rose is a rose is a rose’ provides the focus for this season’s colours placed to mirror the bloom’s corolla or inner structure forming a coronet of petals for the head. Cy Twombley’s huge rose canvases drenched with ecstatic colour inspire this season’s palette as it moves from rich crimson through to the deep blood red of a Harkness rose. Velvety violet is shadowed by damask pink; charcoal grey by soft cream. DADA Dolls by Sassoon Academy | a collection that brings crafted control to Dada chaos.

Hair cut and colour: Sassoon Creative Team led by Mark Hayes | International Creative Director
Make-up: Daniel Koleric
Clothes stylist: Tabitha Owen
Photography: Colin Roy
Colour Product: Chromatology by Sassoon Professional