Hairstylist Adhuna Bhabani collaborates with designer Arpita Mehta for Lakme Fashion Week X FDCI

Celebrity hairstylist Adhuna Bhabani  
| Photo Credit: Siddhant Arya

A model sashays down the stage in an easy, breezy, mango-coloured dress. Once she is seated, celebrity hairstylist Adhuna Bhabani proceeds to lift a lock of the model’s hair and style it perfectly into a free-flowing curl using a Dyson styling tool. Dyson’s hair care technologies is making its debut this year at the Lakme Fashion Week X FDCI with designer Arpita Mehta’s holiday-inspired showcase on March 11 in Mumbai, and Adhuna gives a teaser of some of the looks she will be creating for the 20 models.

Creating these looks for 20 models within one and a half hours on the day of the show is going to be a task for sure, but as someone who has been part of numerous fashion shows internationally as well as within the country, Adhuna knows pretty well what it takes to get the work done. However, that still does not mean it is easy. One can only imagine the frenzy that takes place backstage during a fashion show. “It’s manic!” she exclaims with a full-throated laugh. “Over the years when I have worked on fashion shows, there have been times when we have been set up in a corridor or near a toilet. Whatever is seen up-front is the glory; whatever happens backstage is just chaos, but it is organised chaos,” she adds.

The popular hair stylist who has been at the forefront of innovation and trends in her career spanning more than three decades is excited to collaborate with the designer. “There were a couple of things that I kept in mind when I designed the look. The first was individuality and the second was to focus on the texture as opposed to a style per say, because everybody is unique,” she says. Elaborating on the same, she adds that since all the models have different hair lengths, the idea is to focus more on giving them different styles depending on their hair but also to assimilate curls in each of them. “It is my personal working philosophy that people should be treated as individuals and styled as individuals,” she adds. 

For Arpita’s show, she plans to have a team of six other people working alongside her. “We are trying to approach it as a sort of production line. We will depend on each stylist’s individual strengths to get everyone ready in that short span of time. But yes, it is going to be madness!” she chuckles.

For this show in particular, she has chosen to go with bangs which are very much in trend and have been for a while. But when it comes to trends this year, Adhuna believes they are a lot more varied, than say when they were in the ‘60s, ‘70s or ‘80s. “I think there is a very strong influence from the ‘70s that is being seen across fashion in clothes, hairstyles or colour. I think people are taking those ideas and interpreting them in their own way,” she says.

Since the 2000s , the hairstylist-entrepreneur believes that there has been a lot more fluidity that has seeped in. “People are more well versed with what is going on around the world due to technology. I think style is much more individualistic now and I am really glad people don’t like clones of each other anymore!” she guffaws, before giving this writer some style tips for her own hair.