MERIDIAN ©️

MERIDIAN©

Stripes and Stars

The idea behind Meridian© started with stripes, but not the ones hair styling defaulted to back in the Y2K era — bleached top sections left raw, sometimes finished in red, nothing particularly considered about where each block of colour sat. This piece asked a different question: what if hair stripes borrowed from textile design instead, the way Paul Smith works with stripes in fabric — precise, considered, almost architectural in how the widths and colours relate to each other.

Getting genuine stripes into hair rather than something that just reads as "sectioned colour" takes real mapping before a single foil goes in. Lifting comes first, strategically placed, with some sections deliberately left with more depth depending on the final colour wanted in that stripe. Once the lightening is where it needs to be, the vivid shades go in at varying widths — narrow through some sections, wider through others — which is what pushes the finish toward couture rather than anything that reads as DIY.

With a full fringe like this one, the stripes can grade from wide to narrow moving across the head, creating a sense of rhythm rather than repetition. None of it works without a clean, precise parting underneath — that's the scaffolding the whole stripe pattern depends on.

One of the nicest things about a piece like this is that it never looks quite the same twice. Wash it, dry it, style it differently, and the stripes shift and recompose themselves slightly each time — which feels entirely fitting for something inspired by fabric, since even textiles drape differently depending on how they fall.