Guido Palau’s New Book “Hidden Identities” Shows a New Side of Kaia Gerber
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You can tell a lot about a woman when you look at her hair—renowned hairstylist Guido Palau knows this well.
Over the decades, Palau has become one of the most important hairstylists in the fashion industry, having produced memorable hair moments on runways for Prada, Marc Jacobs, Balenciaga, and more labels—and of course, creating the tip-top supermodel hair immortalized in George Michael’s “Freedom! ’90” video. Fast-forward to now, and Palau is working with today’s generation of supermodels, including his longtime client and friend Kaia Gerber, the star of his latest art book, Hidden Identities, out now from Idea Books.
“Me and Kaia—we’ve worked together for some time now, actually, from the beginning of her career—and we’ve had some great hair moments together,” Palau tells Harper’s Bazaar of the new project. “Just based on our friendship, I said it’d be great to do a little project together, and I had just finished doing my last book, called #HairTests. I thought maybe it’d be great to see Kaia as a different type of model and see her in a new way.”
The result is a vibrant collection of purposely lo-fi images that feature Gerber with a variety of wigs on her head: a choppy bob, platinum blonde curls, a cool blue mullet, and more.
“Whenever I’m traveling, I go to wig stores and pick up wigs that I find interesting, but they’re not always used. I got together all the ones I really liked, and I decided to sort of do these kind of subversive, very character-forward wigs on Kaia,” Palau explains. “I just took video of her on my iPhone and then pulled the images from that. The still images are very low-quality, and that’s why you get this very pixelated, blurry effect. It was a super-collaborative project that we did together, and I didn’t really know how it was going to end up.”
While Hidden Identities is at first glance a book, Galau is hesitant to describe it as such. His DIY approach to producing the project makes him view the final product as something else.
“It’s more like a document or a fanzine, in a way, since it’s quite lo-fi,” he says. “In my mind, these wigs are almost like their own like entities, in a strange way. Putting on these kind of characterful wigs led Kaia to model or act in a certain way, which was very interesting to see, especially as she’s exploring acting more.
“I’m also not a photographer, so there’s a lot to do with [the look of the book],” Palau says, laughing. “I often thought about how when I was growing up, early videos in the late ’70s, early ’80s, the kind of rawness of that kind of maybe glitchy, kind of early sort of VHS video. I always liked that. For me, it’s not about getting a proper camera and proper lighting and all that. The rawness was something that I felt comfortable with, because there was no expectation to it being a technical kind of image.”
If anything, Hidden Identities isn’t a visual manifesto of the whimsy of wigs as much as it’s a physical testatment to Palau and Gerber’s creative relationship. You can see the years of history between the pair in the pages of the project.
“We have created a lot of different things together over many years, so there’s a big trust in each other,” says Palau. “Between a model and any creative or an actress or between collaborators, the trust is what brings out good things. In this project, because there was a lot of mutual trust and friendship and fun, you sort of get together and there’s no fear. That friendship and trust allows you to be experimental.”
Palau knows Hidden Identities will serve as a time capsule of sorts, reminding him of where he was creatively at this moment in time and also preserving a part of his and Gerber’s friendship as well, in a way social media and the internet often can’t.
“There’s something about having a physical hard-copy item like this book. Stuff online, it all comes and goes very quickly. We look at it, then you flip to the next person within a few moments—it might be there, but it’s also already sort of gone. That’s the sort of downside of social media, in a way, that nothing sticks for too long because it’s just continually feeding,” he says. “A book stands still a bit more, and it holds your attention if you buy it. Books, I think, are funny because they’re sort of peaceful things, in a way. I find them very comforting to have around, and to flick through them. There’s a tangibility to them. When I look at old books, it’s like listening to old records—it brings back memories of the time you bought it. It was something you were feeling in that moment. I like it for those reasons.”
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