Contained in the making of Doja Cat’s Coachella hair costumes

Over the weekend, Doja Cat carried out what’s being broadly described because the spotlight of Coachella 2024. The first feminine rapper to headline the pageant, her set was an electrifying tour de drive stuffed with spectacle and avant-garde style. Amidst all of the mud-wrestling and big dinosaur skeletons, one of many greatest highlights was undoubtedly the lustrous, gleaming blonde hair fits that Doja and her dancers wore throughout “Demons” and “Tia Tamera”. 

For magnificence lovers, the costumes have been instantly recognisable because the work of hairstylist Charlie Le Mindu, identified for producing irreverent, wildly imaginative items that blur the boundaries between hair, style and artwork. Le Mindu first created his hair monsters 20 years in the past, and now, on the particular request of Doja and Brett Alan Nelson, her stylist and inventive director, has refigured them into over 20 costumes for her Coachella efficiency. “I’m really happy about it,” says Le Mindu on the telephone from Los Angeles. “It feels like it was a moment for Doja and the moment of Coachella as well.”

Le Mindu was first approached for the challenge round three months in the past by Nelson, who already had a transparent imaginative and prescient of what he wished from the partnership. Having beforehand labored collectively for Doja’s 2022 Coachella costume, Le Mindu says the method was very easy. “She’s so nice to work with and Brett has such a good vision. When you see them working together, Brett and Doja, they have really good collaborations. So they’re really good to work with.”

After going forwards and backwards on the design of the costumes for just a few weeks, Le Mindu and his crew set out on the colossal activity of making 23 hair fits. The course of began with sourcing sufficient hair to make the costumes, all of which needed to be ethically sourced. “What’s very important is to make sure where I get the hair from,” says Le Mindu. “I need to know that my hair dealer gets the hair from good sources, that the people who give their hair get benefits from it, get money for it.” The texture and high quality of the hair have been additionally vital when it got here to dying it blonde, as a result of they have an effect on how color is taken.

Once the hair was efficiently sourced, and Nelson had picked out the shade he wished from samples the crew despatched to him, they set about dying the 400 kilos of hair. It was a week-long course of that concerned big bathtubs of color, which the extensions have been dipped into three or 4 occasions. Alongside his crew, together with right-hand girl Mirina, Le Mindu recruited a gaggle from the Paris College of Arts to assist with the large workload. Altogether, round 25 folks labored to create the costumes. “It was a project that needed as many hands as I could [get] on my team,” he says.

After creating hair costumes for 20 years, Le Mindu has developed the method to get issues performed shortly, however for many who weren’t as used to working with hair, the method took somewhat bit longer to select up. “It was quite challenging at times and they were really long hours,” he says, including that they completed all the pieces in simply three weeks (“which is insane!”).

After being assembled in Paris, the costumes, every weighing round 10 kilos, have been shipped to LA (with a “very expensive FedEx”), the place the dancers had a few week to rehearse within the fits and get used to the additional weight, in addition to the warmth that carrying a full fur costume within the desert brings. Temperature was one of many key issues when Le Mindu was adapting the unique hair swimsuit designs to the wants of the dancers. The different was making certain that they may transfer freely whereas carrying them. The crew used elastic and spandex to let the costume stretch and open in locations “you don’t see”, together with open crotches. To get the design proper, Le Mindu jokes that he acted as his personal mannequin, and danced in entrance of the mirror.

For Doja’s costume, Le Mindu created a very unique design which went via quite a few completely different levels earlier than they settled on the ultimate look. “Doja’s was really changing every day. It started quite thick at the beginning and then we got thinner and thinner and thinner because she needed to be different and it was covering too much at first,” he says. At one level, the hair on the costume was braided, then wavy, however finally Doja didn’t need any restraints and so they selected a small swimsuit design.

The ultimate results of the costumes, and the best way Paris Goebel choreographed the efficiency, is one thing that Le Mindu is pleased with. “It was sexy and it was fun at the same time,” he says. “I think the hair works perfectly with movement, it was great for the stage. When they turned around they looked like car washes and other times like animals.” 

Not solely have been the costumes visually beautiful, however in addition they grew to become the bodily illustration of the sentiments that Doja makes use of her artwork to evoke. “It can be gross to work with hair. I think Doja brings every kind of emotion to people and that’s what hair gives us as well,” says Le Mindu. “It’s beautiful, but it can be also disturbing to see this kind of thing on the stage. And I think that’s what she wants to give – she wants to make people think about these emotions.”

The 23 hair costumes at the moment are being saved for subsequent weekend. While unable to provide any particulars, Le Mindu hinted that they is perhaps given some small tweaks earlier than their second outing. “It’s not an upgrade! Because they were already beautiful, but just a little change. We don’t know yet.”