With clients including Vogue Italia, King Kong and Wonderland, Lydia Chan’s bold headpieces are making waves in the fashion and beauty world. The London based creative originally studied Fashion Communication and Promotion at Central Saint Martins, with dreams of becoming a stylist. Here she began to dabble with set design, jewellery making, millinery and hair styling, finding more satisfaction in being able to engage her different creative impulses rather than being limited to one singular practice. We speak to Chan about her hair philosophy, passive learning, and monsters for muses.

Your creative practice is very diverse, and includes set design, illustration as well as your work with hair. What is it that appeals to you about these different disciplines? I really enjoy the tactile element of my work. I derive a great deal of satisfaction from sculpting out an idea visually and turning something that was an idea into a physical entity with physical presence. I also really enjoy the element of control that comes with my work. I spend a great deal of time manipulating materials, pulling them into extremely thin tight shapes and then ballooning them out into a form with an overwhelming scale. I think that all of these disciplines are not very different from one another, its only main difference is scale and application. Ultimately though they are all about creating a visual narrative through the shaping of objects, colours and space.

What are some of your recent inspirations? I don’t think I have a subject of inspiration, I think my work, when it is my own, is derived from something I want to say, maybe a kind of emotional atmosphere I am experiencing or a kind of narrative I would like to create for others to experience. A lot of my work is also about exploring new techniques or enhancing current skills I have, recently I’ve been more interested in large scale drawing and painting, so I have been spending more time painting backdrops, dip dyeing fabrics and using watercolours.

How did you learn to do hair? I watched Youtube videos and also my mum used to do my hair a lot, but mostly it’s just a lot of common sense, applying my other making skills into the context of hair, and working with materials that I know and understand. Someone once called me a passive learner, I think people are often surprised by the kind of information that seeps into our minds and is then reapplied in different contexts. I feel like that’s how my hair technique has been derived.

Do you prefer to use synthetic hair or human hair? Definitely synthetic. I’ve never worked with human hair that wasn’t attached to a person’s body. When it is attached to the body, hair has such a great variance from person to person. It has its own texture, directionality, moisture content, oiliness etc, far too many attributes to consider for my work! I create most of my hairpieces as exaggerated wigs, or even like masks or hats to be worn by models later, so with synthetic hair I can glue, tape, spray and heat to my heart’s content.