Nobody put her in Rollers
NOBODY PUT HER IN ROLLERS
Back at Daisy's, the bread and butter of any given week was the shampoo and set. Rollers in, under the dryer, out come the heated tongs for the weekly blow-dry. We loved those ladies and we loved that work — it was the beating heart of the salon, and there's no artistic snobbery in saying so. But it did mean I knew exactly what an older woman having her hair done was "supposed" to look like, because I'd been doing it, gladly, for years.
Which is exactly why this experiment stopped me in my tracks.
Years ago I built a wig 2014/2015— a bold, ikat-patterned piece in cream, magenta, and deep purple-navy, cut into a sharp blunt bob with a heavy fringe. Nothing about it was designed with restraint in mind. I photographed myself wearing it at the time, fairly confrontational stare and all.
Recently I ran that image through AI — specifically Grok, by xAI, and I want to be upfront about that, because I think honesty about the tools matters as much as the art itself. I asked for the same wig, the same energy, but placed on an older woman, with the colours pushed deeper. What came back wasn't a copy. The pattern shifted slightly on its own, the colours went richer than I'd asked for, and the result was a woman who looked to be somewhere in her eighties, wrinkled, magnificent, wearing the wig like she'd been born in it. Dramatic eyes, a bold fuchsia lip, and — entirely the AI's own addition — i thenstarted to prompt for the overall look in my mind with a heavy gold and black stone collar layered over dark beaded necklaces, like something unearthed from an empress's jewellery box.
I loved her immediately. And I've been trying to work out exactly why.
Partly it's simple rarity. You do not walk down a high street and see an eighty-something woman in an avant-garde ikat wig and a statement collar fit for royalty. You might see it in New York. You might, if you were very lucky, have once caught Zandra Rhodes crossing a room — a designer who spent her whole career refusing to let age dictate volume, colour, or drama, and who never once dimmed any of it to fit an expectation of "appropriate." That's who this AI woman reminded me of the moment she appeared on screen.
To be clear — I'm not saying every woman in her eighties should want this, or that the shampoo-and-set brigade were doing anything wrong by wanting exactly what they wanted. I don't walk around in wigs like this myself day to day either. That was never the point. The point is freedom — the freedom that comes specifically from not standing behind a salon chair anymore, not owing anyone a commercial, wearable result. If I'm going to put a wig on anyone, real or generated, I may as well go all the way. A tame balayage on a human-hair wig would have taught me nothing. This taught me plenty.
I've been retired a long time now, and I genuinely don't know what salon life looks like today — whether the rollers and the weekly blow-dry still hold the room the way they did for us, or whether the whole rhythm of it has changed. But I do know this: somewhere between the shampoo-and-set generation and whatever comes next, there's room for an eighty-year-old in an ikat bob and a jewelled collar, looking utterly unbothered by the fact that nobody expected her.
