Hair & fashion: showcasing Scottish talent with RRI

On Monday evening, I had the pleasure of being invited to blog at the Rainbow Room International annual hair and fashion show in Glasgow.

The event was held at arts space SWG3, which was perfect for accommodating the full length catwalk and crowds in attendance.

The aim of the show was to allow each of RRI’s twelve salons to showcase their up and coming home grown talent.

Upon joining RRI, budding hairdressers undertake both on the job training and time in the RRI training academy in Glasgow before achieving full hairdressing accreditation.

This event was a great opportunity to let the teams’ creative juices run wild in order to create high fashion looks that could be refined in salon for original hair ups, hair piece pin ins, colouring or cuts.

Before introducing the salons on stage, two of the brand’s directors explained that the assistants from each salon had worked together to come up with a key fashion concept, and then styled their five minutes on the catwalk around this concept using a combination of choreography, music, fashion – and of course – the latest in avant garde hair design.

I was extremely impressed with the styling and how professionally the catwalk show had been put together.

My personal favourites from the evening were the concepts created by the Great Western Road salon with their weather theme, and the Uddingston salon who closed the show with their Rio World Cup inspired theme.

In saying that, all of the salons had really gone for it using their themes to achieve extremely dramatic and colourful productions.

Hair-up wise, there were a lot of big “candy floss” styles that made full use of back combing and hair pieces. Braids also featured heavily throughout.

Innovative colour tricks were also used: stencilling colour images was one I hadn’t seen before, and I loved the new metallic shades which I’m certain will hit the salons big time this summer.

I’m also a sucker for pink and blue colour dust (also in abundance). As pretty as the dust effect is, the pastel shades definitely look better on fairer hair rather than on brunette tresses like mine, where ombré amber was still the order of the day.

A great evening – well done to all involved.

Although this event was sponsored, my post was not and consequently all views are my own.