Charlie Le Mindu x Coachella 2025

“The original hair costumes that debuted with Doja Cat in 2024 came from a shared desire to build a world—one that was visceral, sculptural, and surreal. Doja, her stylist Brett Alan Nelson, and I wanted to make hair the protagonist, not the afterthought. That meant treating it like couture: sourcing over 200kg of 100% human hair, hand-dyeing it into gradients like platinum, blood pink, or ocean teal, and constructing full-body catsuits where the hair became the fabric. It took weeks of work with a team of couturiers and hairstylists in Paris. The process was pure haute coiffure meeting haute couture, stitching hair strand by strand onto fitted bases, sculpting with volume, and engineering mobility for dancers to perform in 10kg suits under desert heat.

But what’s been especially exciting is how the relationship has grown. Coachella 2025 marked my second year collaborating with the festival—and this time, with method, the haircare brand, I got to push things even further in a new direction.

For method’s presence this year, I created a new series of sculptural hair costumes, more like living installations than stagewear. They were inspired by the textures and personalities of the brand’s extended haircare line, and each costume explored a different “hair identity,” using surreal shapes and colour stories: from soft iridescent coils to fierce and fiery sunset ombrés. They weren’t just about beauty, they were about hair as an emotion, as a rebellion, as a a way to express yourself.

These pieces were designed for an immersive display, to exist in method’s desert dreamscape installation, where the audience could walk around them and feel completely absorbed. It was like taking the energy of a runway or a music video and slowing it down, turning the volume up on details and textures. No seams, no visible structure: just pure hair.

It’s humbling, honestly, to see how hair—a material I’ve worked with my entire life—can evolve from something purely aesthetic into something that lives in fashion, performance, sculpture, and now even brand storytelling. For me, it’s not about trends or seasonal collections. It’s about transformation, about characters, and about letting hair take over space!”

– Charlie Le Mindu