STACEY- DAISY’S

Stacey

Stacey did her apprenticeship at Daisy's Hair Shop — full-time in the salon, studying at college alongside it. I don't have many photographs of her left from that time, which is a shame, because she went through a good few looks over the time she was with us.

You always knew Stacey had arrived before you actually saw her, because she was laughing. She had that kind of presence — quirky, properly funny, always somewhere in the salon with a laugh going. That's honestly as much a part of remembering her as anything to do with her hair.

This particular look was a short crop — very on-trend at the time — with a dark base and lifted flashes running through it, then Fudge direct dyes worked through in chilli and red corvette. In daylight, the colours really popped against the dark base. It was one of the styles that photographed well precisely because it was so graphic — bold colour against a short, textured crop.

This was photographed for magazine work by Dave Sutton, and it's genuinely one of the only images I still have of her.

I want to be clear about what I've actually changed here, because it matters: nothing about Stacey. She looked striking exactly as she was on the day of that shoot, and she didn't need changing — not her, not her features, not anything about her. What I've altered is the styling around the photograph — the top swapped for plain black material, a different necklace, a darker background with different lighting. That does shift the aesthetic considerably, I'll admit. But it's restyling the presentation, not the person.

Part of why I did it is simply that we're in different times now, and it felt like an interesting way to bring an older image into a more contemporary setting — short crops like this could easily come back around; you never know with fashion. But there's also a genuinely honest reason for the darker, warmer lighting: it's a fair representation of how that colour actually read in real settings. Under venue or nightclub lighting, the red would dominate and cast the whole look warmer, whereas daylight showed the dark base and the lifted flashes more distinctly. So the "restyled" version isn't unfaithful to how the colour genuinely looked — it's just showing a different lighting condition she'd actually have been seen in.

Short crops like this — bold colour, dark base, vivid flashes — were everywhere in the industry at the time. Easy to underestimate now.

Wherever Stacey is now, I hope she's still making an entrance.

Restyled presentation only — top, jewellery, and background. Hair, cut, colour and Stacey herself are unaltered from the original photograph.